Model reference · open weights

granite-4.0-micro

LLMs ibm-granite Text gen 1 build Open weights 59k dl/mo

granite-4.0-micro is an open-weight language model from IBM. granite-4.0-micro (BF16) weighs 6.8 GB; the smallest configuration that runs it is RTX 3060 12 GB.

  • Granite-4.0-Micro is a 3.4B parameter text-generation model developed by IBM for enterprise applications and AI assistants.
  • It features a 131,072 token context length and supports English, German, Spanish, French, Japanese, Portuguese, Arabic, Czech, Italian, Korean, Dutch, and Chinese.
  • The model is licensed under Apache 2.0 and is designed for tasks such as summarization, question-answering, and tool-calling.

Summary of the ibm-granite/granite-4.0-micro model card, 2026-10-01

What it is

Released byIBM
Released2025-09-16
Parameters3.4B
VRAM6.8 GB for the weights

What it runs on

Memory and cards for granite-4.0-micro (BF16)

6.8 GBweights, file size
82 MBcache per 1K tokens
641 MBruntime overhead, at least
131,072 tokenscontext max
CardRequests at onceContext maxMemory
8K each32K each
RTX 3060 12 GB6149K11.6 GB
RTX 4060 Ti 16 GB11294K15.4 GB
RTX 3090 24 GB235all 128K23.4 GB
RTX 4090 24 GB235all 128K23.4 GB
RTX 5090 32 GB358all 128K31.0 GB
L40S 48 GB5413all 128K44.0 GB
A100 80 GB10526all 128K78.2 GB
H100 80 GB9924all 128K78.1 GB
RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell 96 GB12330all 128K93.8 GB
DGX Spark (GB10) 128 GB unified14335all 128K107 GB
H200 141 GB18947all 128K138 GB
B200 180 GB24561all 128K176 GB
2× RTX 3060 12 GB
tensor parallel
225all 128K11.6 GB a card
Memory needed at each load
Requests at once8K tokens each32K tokens each
18.1 GB10.1 GB
510.8 GB20.9 GB
812.8 GB28.9 GB
1618.2 GB50.4 GB
3228.9 GB93.3 GB
6450.4 GB179 GB

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

From the model card

What IBM says about granite-4.0-micro

Read the model card

Granite-4.0-Micro

📣 Update [10-07-2025]: Added a default system prompt to the chat template to guide the model towards more professional, accurate, and safe responses.

Model Summary: Granite-4.0-Micro is a 3B parameter long-context instruct model finetuned from Granite-4.0-Micro-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. Granite 4.0 instruct models feature improved instruction following (IF) and tool-calling capabilities, making them more effective in enterprise applications.

Supported Languages: English, German, Spanish, French, Japanese, Portuguese, Arabic, Czech, Italian, Korean, Dutch, and Chinese. Users may finetune Granite 4.0 models for languages beyond these languages.

Intended use: The model is designed to follow general instructions and can serve as the foundation for AI assistants across diverse domains, including business applications, as well as for LLM agents equipped with tool-use capabilities.

Capabilities

  • Summarization
  • Text classification
  • Text extraction
  • Question-answering
  • Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG)
  • Code related tasks
  • Function-calling tasks
  • Multilingual dialog use cases
  • Fill-In-the-Middle (FIM) code completions

Generation: This is a simple example of how to use Granite-4.0-Micro 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 = "cuda"
model_path = "ibm-granite/granite-4.0-micro"
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[0])

Expected output:

Tool-calling: Granite-4.0-Micro comes with enhanced tool calling capabilities, enabling seamless integration with external functions and APIs. To define a list of tools please follow OpenAI's function definition schema.

This is an example of how to use Granite-4.0-Micro model tool-calling ability:

import torch
from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM, AutoTokenizer

device = "cuda"
model_path = "ibm-granite/granite-4.0-micro"
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(model_path)
# drop device_map if running on CPU
model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained(model_path, device_map=device)
model.eval()

tools = [
    {
        "type": "function",
        "function": {
            "name": "get_current_weather",
            "description": "Get the current weather for a specified city.",
            "parameters": {
                "type": "object",
                "properties": {
                    "city": {
                        "type": "string",
                        "description": "Name of the city"
                    }
                },
                "required": ["city"]
            }
        }
    }
]

# change input text as desired
chat = [
    { "role": "user", "content": "What's the weather like in Boston right now?" },
]
chat = tokenizer.apply_chat_template(chat, \
                                     tokenize=False, \
                                     tools=tools, \
                                     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[0])

Expected output:


You are provided with function signatures within  XML tags:
{"type": "function", "function": {"name": "get_current_weather", "description": "Get the current weather for a specified city.", "parameters": {"type": "object", "properties": {"city": {"type": "string", "description": "Name of the city"}}, "required": ["city"]}}}

For each tool call, return a json object with function name and arguments within  XML tags:
{"name": , "arguments": }
{"name": "get_current_weather", "arguments": {"city": "Boston"}}

Evaluation Results:

General Tasks
Alignment Tasks
Math Tasks
Code Tasks
Tool Calling Tasks
Multilingual Tasks
Safety

Model Architecture:

Granite-4.0-Micro baseline is built on a decoder-only dense transformer architecture. Core components of this architecture ar

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

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