As well as blockchain, the effort employs AI to help predict the evolution of the COVID-19 pandemic based on patient information including genetic profiles, medical records and prior treatment of the virus. Utilizing what's known as the Deep Intelligence AI platform, they can make predictions on the behavior of the virus by combining data and information from scientific journals, news articles and healthcare records.

Earlier this month, IBM made news when it formally dropped out of future development work on the open source Swift programming language, originally created at Apple. As we previously reported, IBM told the Swift organization that thanks to "a review by IBM of its open source priorities, it has been decided that they will not be continuing to work on Swift in 2020." Chris Ferris, CTO of IBM's OpenTech initiative, tells Business Insider that despite leaving this high-profile project, the company's love of open source projects has not diminished. He says the opposite is true, especially since IBM closed its $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat earlier this year. Red Hat is the most successful commercial open source software company of all time.