Model reference · open weights

granite-3.1

LLMs ibm-granite Text gen 4 builds Open weights 47k dl/mo

granite-3.1 is an open-weight language model from IBM. granite-3.1-1b-a400m-instruct (BF16) weighs 2.7 GB; the smallest configuration that runs it is RTX 3060 12 GB.

  • Granite-3.1-8B-Instruct is an 8.2B parameter text-generation model developed by IBM for general instruction following and long-context tasks.
  • It features a 131072 token context length and supports 12 languages, including English, German, and Chinese.
  • The model is released under the Apache 2.0 license.

Summary of the ibm-granite/granite-3.1-8b-instruct model card, 2026-10-01. The estimate below is for another build of the family.

What it is

Released byIBM
Released2024-12-06
Parameters8.2B
VRAM2.7 GB for the weights

What it runs on

Memory and cards for granite-3.1-1b-a400m-instruct (BF16)

2.7 GBweights, file size
49 MBcache per 1K tokens
501 MBruntime overhead, at least
131,072 tokenscontext max
CardRequests at onceContext maxMemory
8K each32K each
RTX 3060 12 GB205all 128K11.6 GB
RTX 4060 Ti 16 GB307all 128K15.4 GB
RTX 3090 24 GB5012all 128K23.4 GB
RTX 4090 24 GB5012all 128K23.4 GB
RTX 5090 32 GB6917all 128K31.0 GB
L40S 48 GB10125all 128K44.0 GB
A100 80 GB18646all 128K78.2 GB
H100 80 GB17944all 128K78.1 GB
RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell 96 GB21854all 128K93.8 GB
DGX Spark (GB10) 128 GB unified25162all 128K107 GB
H200 141 GB32781all 128K138 GB
B200 180 GB422105all 128K176 GB
Memory needed at each load
Requests at once8K tokens each32K tokens each
13.6 GB4.8 GB
55.2 GB11.2 GB
86.4 GB16.1 GB
169.6 GB28.9 GB
3216.1 GB54.7 GB
6428.9 GB106 GB

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

Builds

Sizes, precisions & builds

BuildParamsPrecisionWeightsSmallest setup
granite-3.1-8b-instruct ↗ 8.2BBF16 16.3 GB2× RTX 3060 12 GB
granite-3.1-2b-instruct ↗ 2.5BBF16 5.1 GBRTX 3060 12 GB
granite-3.1-1b-a400m-instruct (above) ↗ 1.3BBF16 2.7 GBRTX 3060 12 GB
granite-3.1-2b-instruct-quantized.w4a16 ↗
packaged by RedHatAI
2.6BINT4 1.7 GBRTX 3060 12 GB

From the model card

What IBM says about granite-3.1

Read the model card

Model Summary: Granite-3.1-8B-Instruct is a 8B parameter long-context instruct model finetuned from Granite-3.1-8B-Base using a combination of open source instruction datasets with permissive license and internally collected synthetic datasets tailored for solving long context problems. 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 3.1 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
  • Long-context tasks including long document/meeting summarization, long document QA, etc.

Generation: This is a simple example of how to use Granite-3.1-8B-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-3.1-8b-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)

Evaluation Results:

Model Architecture: Granite-3.1-8B-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.

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 including long-context tasks, and (3) very small amounts of human-curated data. A detailed attribution of datasets can be found in the Granite 3.0 Technical Report, Granite 3.1 Technical Report (coming soon), and Accompanying Author List.

Infrastructure: We train Granite 3.1 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.

Ethical Considerations and Limitations: Granite 3.1 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 Granite learning resources: https://ibm.biz/granite-learning-resources

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

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