Model reference · open weights

granite-4.1

LLMs ibm-granite Text gen 5 builds Open weights 1.3M dl/mo

granite-4.1 is an open-weight language model from IBM. granite-4.1-8b-fp8 (FP8) weighs 9.6 GB; the smallest configuration that runs it is RTX 4060 Ti 16 GB.

  • Granite-4.1-8B is an 8.8B parameter text-generation model developed by IBM.
  • It is designed for instruction following, tool calling, and multilingual dialog use cases.
  • The model supports a context length of 131,072 tokens and is released under the Apache 2.0 license.

Summary of the ibm-granite/granite-4.1-8b model card, 2026-10-01. The estimate below is for another build of the family.

What it is

Released byIBM
Released2026-04-06
Parameters8.8B
VRAM9.6 GB for the weights

What it runs on

Memory and cards for granite-4.1-8b-fp8 (FP8)

9.6 GBweights, file size
164 MBcache per 1K tokens
704 MBruntime overhead, at least
131,072 tokenscontext max
CardRequests at onceContext maxMemory
8K each32K each
RTX 3060 12 GB
FP8 without its speed-up here
——7K11.6 GB
RTX 4060 Ti 16 GB3—30K15.4 GB
RTX 3090 24 GB
FP8 without its speed-up here
9277K23.4 GB
RTX 4090 24 GB9277K23.4 GB
RTX 5090 32 GB153123K31.0 GB
L40S 48 GB256all 128K44.0 GB
A100 80 GB
FP8 without its speed-up here
5012all 128K78.2 GB
H100 80 GB4711all 128K78.1 GB
RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell 96 GB5914all 128K93.8 GB
DGX Spark (GB10) 128 GB unified6917all 128K107 GB
H200 141 GB9223all 128K138 GB
B200 180 GB12030all 128K176 GB
2× RTX 3060 12 GB
tensor parallel · FP8 without its speed-up here
9272K11.6 GB a card
2× RTX 4060 Ti 16 GB
tensor parallel
143117K15.4 GB a card
Memory needed at each load
Requests at once8K tokens each32K tokens each
111.7 GB15.7 GB
517.0 GB37.2 GB
821.1 GB53.3 GB
1631.8 GB96.2 GB
3253.3 GB182 GB
6496.2 GB354 GB

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

Builds

Sizes, precisions & builds

BuildParamsPrecisionWeightsSmallest setup
granite-4.1-8b ↗ 8.8BBF16 17.6 GB2× RTX 3060 12 GB
granite-4.1-30b ↗ 28.9BBF16 57.7 GBH100 80 GB
granite-4.1-3b ↗ 3.4BBF16 6.8 GBRTX 3060 12 GB
granite-4.1-8b-fp8 (above) ↗ 8.8BFP8 9.6 GBRTX 4060 Ti 16 GB
granite-4.1-3b-GGUF ↗
15 builds: Q2_K 1.4 GB … BF16 6.8 GB
—GGUF 2.1 GBRTX 3060 12 GB

From the model card

What IBM says about granite-4.1

Read the model card

Granite-4.1-8B

Model Summary: Granite-4.1-8B is a 8B parameter long-context instruct model finetuned from Granite-4.1-8B-Base using a combination of open source instruction datasets with permissive license and internally collected synthetic datasets. Granite 4.1 models have gone through an improved post-training pipeline, including supervised finetuning and reinforcement learning alignment, resulting in enhanced tool calling, instruction following, and chat capabilities.

Supported Languages: English, German, Spanish, French, Japanese, Portuguese, Arabic, Czech, Italian, Korean, Dutch, and Chinese. Users may finetune Granite 4.1 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-4.1-8B 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-4.1-8b"
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-4.1-8B 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-4.1-8B model tool-calling ability:

import torch
from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM, AutoTokenizer

device = "cuda"
model_path = "ibm-granite/granite-4.1-8b"
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-4.1-8B baseline is built on a decoder-only dense transformer architecture. Core components of this architecture are: GQA, 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 dat

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

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