Model reference · open weights

SmolLM2-16k

LLMs HuggingFaceTB Text gen 1 build Open weights 151 dl/mo

SmolLM2-16k is an open-weight language model from Hugging Face. SmolLM2-1.7B-Instruct-16k (BF16) weighs 3.4 GB; the smallest configuration that runs it is RTX 3060 12 GB.

  • SmolLM2-16k is a 1.7B parameter text-generation model developed by Hugging Face, designed for on-device use with a 16,384 token context length.
  • The model is fine-tuned for instruction following and supports tasks such as summarization and function calling, primarily in English.
  • It is released under the Apache 2.0 license.

Summary of the HuggingFaceTB/SmolLM2-1.7B-Instruct-16k model card, 2026-10-01

What it is

Released byHugging Face
Released2025-02-21
Parameters1.7B
VRAM3.4 GB for the weights

What it runs on

Memory and cards for SmolLM2-1.7B-Instruct-16k (BF16)

3.4 GBweights, file size
197 MBcache per 1K tokens
580 MBruntime overhead, at least
16,384 tokenscontext max
CardRequests at onceContext maxMemory
8K each
RTX 3060 12 GB4all 16K11.6 GB
RTX 4060 Ti 16 GB7all 16K15.4 GB
RTX 3090 24 GB12all 16K23.4 GB
RTX 4090 24 GB12all 16K23.4 GB
RTX 5090 32 GB16all 16K31.0 GB
L40S 48 GB24all 16K44.0 GB
A100 80 GB46all 16K78.2 GB
H100 80 GB44all 16K78.1 GB
RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell 96 GB53all 16K93.8 GB
DGX Spark (GB10) 128 GB unified62all 16K107 GB
H200 141 GB81all 16K138 GB
B200 180 GB104all 16K176 GB
2× RTX 3060 12 GB
tensor parallel
11all 16K11.6 GB a card
2× RTX 4060 Ti 16 GB
tensor parallel
16all 16K15.4 GB a card
Memory needed at each load
Requests at once8K tokens each
15.6 GB
512.1 GB
816.9 GB
1629.8 GB
3255.5 GB
64107 GB

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

From the model card

What Hugging Face says about SmolLM2-16k

Read the model card

This is a 16k context version of SmolLM2-1.7B-Instruct, which originnaly only supported 8k context. We finetune the model on 15k samples consisting of a subset of SmolTalk, LongAlign and SeaLong datasets and increase RoPE from 100k to 500k. This improves the evaluation on HELMET on 8k and 16k context with a small degradation on short context

MetricSmolLM2-1.7B-InstructSmolLM2-1.7B-Instruct-16k
Avg HELMET 8k35.8737.24
Avg HELMET 16k/32.40
Avg Short35.7132.06
GSM8K (5-shot)48.1444.27
MATH20.1218.22
ARC (Average)47.5551.52
IFEval (Average)47.540.29

We report the average on HELMET's: RAG, ICL, Re-rank and LongQA tasks.

Model Summary

SmolLM2 is a family of compact language models available in three size: 135M, 360M, and 1.7B parameters. They are capable of solving a wide range of tasks while being lightweight enough to run on-device. More details in our paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.02737v1

The 1.7B variant demonstrates significant advances over its predecessor SmolLM1-1.7B, particularly in instruction following, knowledge, reasoning, and mathematics. It was trained on 11 trillion tokens using a diverse dataset combination: FineWeb-Edu, DCLM, The Stack, along with new mathematics and coding datasets that we curated and will release soon. We developed the instruct version through supervised fine-tuning (SFT) using a combination of public datasets and our own curated datasets. We then applied Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) using UltraFeedback.

The instruct model additionally supports tasks such as text rewriting, summarization and function calling thanks to datasets developed by Argilla such as Synth-APIGen-v0.1. You can find the SFT dataset here: https://huggingface.co/datasets/HuggingFaceTB/smoltalk.

For more details refer to: https://github.com/huggingface/smollm. You will find pre-training, post-training, evaluation and local inference code.

How to use

Transformers

pip install transformers
from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM, AutoTokenizer
checkpoint = "HuggingFaceTB/SmolLM2-1.7B-Instruct-16k"

device = "cuda" # for GPU usage or "cpu" for CPU usage
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(checkpoint)
# for multiple GPUs install accelerate and do `model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained(checkpoint, device_map="auto")`
model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained(checkpoint).to(device)

messages = [{"role": "user", "content": "What is the capital of France."}]
input_text=tokenizer.apply_chat_template(messages, tokenize=False)
inputs = tokenizer.encode(input_text, return_tensors="pt").to(device)
outputs = model.generate(inputs, max_new_tokens=50, temperature=0.2, top_p=0.9, do_sample=True)
print(tokenizer.decode(outputs[0]))

Limitations

SmolLM2 models primarily understand and generate content in English. They can produce text on a variety of topics, but the generated content may not always be factually accurate, logically consistent, or free from biases present in the training data. These models should be used as assistive tools rather than definitive sources of information. Users should always verify important information and critically evaluate any generated content.

License

Apache 2.0

Citation

@misc{allal2025smollm2smolgoesbig,
      title={SmolLM2: When Smol Goes Big -- Data-Centric Training of a Small Language Model},
      author={Loubna Ben Allal and Anton Lozhkov and Elie Bakouch and Gabriel Martín Blázquez and Guilherme Penedo and Lewis Tunstall and Andrés Marafioti and Hynek Kydlíček and Agustín Piqueres Lajarín and Vaibhav Srivastav and Joshua Lochner and Caleb Fahlgren and Xuan-Son Nguyen and Clémentine Fourrier and Ben Burtenshaw and Hugo Larcher and Haojun Zhao and Cyril Zakka and Mathieu Morlon and Colin Raffel and Leandro von Werra and Thomas Wolf},
      year={2025},
      eprint={2502.02737},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      primaryClass={cs.CL},
      url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.02737},
}

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

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