Model reference · open weights

granite-3.0

LLMs ibm-granite Text gen 4 builds Open weights 154k dl/mo

granite-3.0 is an open-weight language model from IBM. granite-3.0-2b-instruct (BF16) weighs 5.3 GB; the smallest configuration that runs it is RTX 3060 12 GB.

  • Granite-3.0-8B-Instruct is an 8.2B parameter text-generation model developed by IBM.
  • It is designed for general instruction following and building AI assistants, supporting tasks such as summarization, question-answering, and code generation.
  • The model features a 4096 token context length, supports 12 languages, and is released under the Apache 2.0 license.

Summary of the ibm-granite/granite-3.0-8b-instruct model card, 2026-10-01. The estimate below is for another build of the family.

What it is

Released byIBM
Released2024-10-02
Parameters8.2B
VRAM5.3 GB for the weights

What it runs on

Memory and cards for granite-3.0-2b-instruct (BF16)

5.3 GBweights, file size
82 MBcache per 1K tokens
580 MBruntime overhead, at least
4,096 tokenscontext max
CardRequests at onceContext maxMemory
4K each
RTX 3060 12 GB17all 4K11.6 GB
RTX 4060 Ti 16 GB28all 4K15.4 GB
RTX 3090 24 GB52all 4K23.4 GB
RTX 4090 24 GB52all 4K23.4 GB
RTX 5090 32 GB75all 4K31.0 GB
L40S 48 GB113all 4K44.0 GB
A100 80 GB215all 4K78.2 GB
H100 80 GB206all 4K78.1 GB
RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell 96 GB253all 4K93.8 GB
DGX Spark (GB10) 128 GB unified293all 4K107 GB
H200 141 GB384all 4K138 GB
B200 180 GB497all 4K176 GB
Memory needed at each load
Requests at once4K tokens each
16.2 GB
57.5 GB
88.5 GB
1611.2 GB
3216.6 GB
6427.3 GB

One card, with vLLM's small-card settings.

Builds

Sizes, precisions & builds

BuildParamsPrecisionWeightsSmallest setup
granite-3.0-8b-instruct ↗ 8.2BBF16 16.3 GB2× RTX 3060 12 GB
granite-3.0-1b-a400m-instruct ↗ 1.3BBF16 2.7 GBRTX 3060 12 GB
granite-3.0-1b-a400m-base ↗ 1.4BFP32 2.8 GBRTX 3060 12 GB
granite-3.0-2b-instruct (above) ↗ 2.6BBF16 5.3 GBRTX 3060 12 GB

From the model card

What IBM says about granite-3.0

Read the model card

Model Summary: Granite-3.0-8B-Instruct is a 8B parameter model finetuned from Granite-3.0-8B-Base using a combination of open source instruction datasets with permissive license and internally collected synthetic datasets. This model is developed using a diverse set of techniques with a structured chat format, including supervised finetuning, model alignment using reinforcement learning, and model merging.

Supported Languages: English, German, Spanish, French, Japanese, Portuguese, Arabic, Czech, Italian, Korean, Dutch, and Chinese. Users may finetune Granite 3.0 models for languages beyond these 12 languages.

Intended use: The model is designed to respond to general instructions and can be used to build AI assistants for multiple domains, including business applications.

Capabilities

  • Summarization
  • Text classification
  • Text extraction
  • Question-answering
  • Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG)
  • Code related tasks
  • Function-calling tasks
  • Multilingual dialog use cases

Generation: This is a simple example of how to use Granite-3.0-8B-Instruct model.

Install the following libraries:

pip install torch torchvision torchaudio
pip install accelerate
pip install transformers

Then, copy the snippet from the section that is relevant for your use case.

import torch
from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM, AutoTokenizer

device = "auto"
model_path = "ibm-granite/granite-3.0-8b-instruct"
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(model_path)
# drop device_map if running on CPU
model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained(model_path, device_map=device)
model.eval()
# change input text as desired
chat = [
    { "role": "user", "content": "Please list one IBM Research laboratory located in the United States. You should only output its name and location." },
]
chat = tokenizer.apply_chat_template(chat, tokenize=False, add_generation_prompt=True)
# tokenize the text
input_tokens = tokenizer(chat, return_tensors="pt").to(device)
# generate output tokens
output = model.generate(**input_tokens,
                        max_new_tokens=100)
# decode output tokens into text
output = tokenizer.batch_decode(output)
# print output
print(output)

Model Architecture: Granite-3.0-8B-Instruct is based on a decoder-only dense transformer architecture. Core components of this architecture are: GQA and RoPE, MLP with SwiGLU, RMSNorm, and shared input/output embeddings.

Model2B Dense8B Dense1B MoE3B MoE
Embedding size2048409610241536
Number of layers40402432
Attention head size641286464
Number of attention heads32321624
Number of KV heads8888
MLP hidden size819212800512512
MLP activationSwiGLUSwiGLUSwiGLUSwiGLU
Number of Experts——3240
MoE TopK——88
Initialization std0.10.10.10.1
Sequence Length4096409640964096
Position EmbeddingRoPERoPERoPERoPE
# Parameters2.5B8.1B1.3B3.3B
# Active Parameters2.5B8.1B400M800M
# Training tokens12T12T10T10T

Training Data: Overall, our SFT data is largely comprised of three key sources: (1) publicly available datasets with permissive license, (2) internal synthetic data targeting specific capabilities, and (3) very small amounts of human-curated data. A detailed attribution of datasets can be found in the Granite Technical Report and Accompanying Author List.

Infrastructure: We train Granite 3.0 Language Models using IBM's super computing cluster, Blue Vela, which is outfitted with NVIDIA H100 GPUs. This cluster provides a scalable and efficient infrastructure for training our models over thousands of GPUs while minimizing environmental impact by utilizing 100% renewable energy sources.

Ethical Considerations and Limitations: Granite 3.0 Instruct Models are primarily finetuned using instruction-response pairs mostly in English, but also multilingual data covering eleven languages. Although this model can handle multilingual dialog use cases, its performance might not be similar to English tasks. In such case, introducing a small number of examples (few-shot) can help the model in generating more accurate outputs. While this model has been aligned by keeping safety in consideration, the model may in some cases produce inaccurate, biased, or unsafe responses to user prompts. So we urge the community to use this model with proper safety testing and tuning tailored for their specific tasks.

Resources

  • ⭐️ Learn about the latest updates with Granite: https://www.ibm.com/granite
  • 📄 Get started with tutorials, best practices, and prompt engineering advice: https://www.ibm.com/granite/docs/
  • 💡 Learn about the latest Granit

Quoted from the model card on Hugging Face. The full card is behind the Hugging Face link above.

Benchmarks

Reported results

As published on the model card: the maker's own numbers, not measured by AxForge.

TaskDatasetMetricScore
text-generationIFEvalpass@152.270
text-generationMT-Benchpass@18.220
text-generationAGI-Evalpass@140.520
text-generationMMLUpass@165.820
text-generationMMLU-Propass@134.450
text-generationOBQApass@146.600
text-generationSIQApass@171.210
text-generationHellaswagpass@182.610
text-generationWinoGrandepass@177.510
text-generationTruthfulQApass@160.320
text-generationBoolQpass@188.650
text-generationSQuAD 2.0pass@121.580
text-generationARC-Cpass@164.160
text-generationGPQApass@133.810
text-generationBBHpass@151.550
text-generationHumanEvalSynthesispass@164.630
text-generationHumanEvalExplainpass@157.160
text-generationHumanEvalFixpass@165.850
text-generationMBPPpass@149.600
text-generationGSM8Kpass@168.990
text-generationMATHpass@130.940
text-generationPAWS-X (7 langs)pass@164.940
text-generationMGSM (6 langs)pass@148.200
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