During the Red Hat Summit earlier this year, Red Hat expanded its platform capabilities by introducing OpenShift AI. This move was aimed at addressing the needs of organizations that anticipate incorporating more artificial intelligence (AI) workloads into their mix of applications running on OpenShift. The objective was to solidify Red Hat's position as the preferred platform for developers and infrastructure operators to build and run applications in a distributed IT environment encompassing public and private clouds, as well as edge computing. OpenShift AI offers a standardized foundation for creating production-ready AI and machine learning models.

In addition, Red Hat collaborated with IBM on Ansible Lightspeed, involving training IBM's Watson Code Assistant to write Ansible automation playbooks. It's worth noting that Red Hat's AI advancements were somewhat overshadowed by the open source community's reaction to its decision to limit access to the source code of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) exclusively to its customers. This decision, announced about a month after the summit, was a measure aimed at preventing unauthorized use and redistribution of RHEL code without value-added contributions. In an interview with Computer Weekly, Red Hat CEO Matt Hicks discussed the company's efforts to support the adoption of generative AI in hybrid cloud environments, the competitive landscape for machine learning operations (MLOps) tooling, and how the company is addressing community concerns related to the RHEL source code limitation.