Model reference · open weights

snowflake-arctic

LLMs Snowflake Text gen 1 build Open weights 6k dl/mo

snowflake-arctic is an open-weight language model from Snowflake. snowflake-arctic-instruct (BF16) weighs 957 GB; the smallest configuration that runs it is 8× H200 141 GB.

  • Snowflake Arctic is a text-generation model developed by the Snowflake AI Research Team, featuring a dense-MoE Hybrid transformer architecture.
  • It contains 478.6 billion parameters with a context length of 4096 tokens and is released under the Apache-2.0 license.
  • The model accepts text input and generates text and code output.

Summary of the Snowflake/snowflake-arctic-instruct model card, 2026-10-01

What it is

Released bySnowflake
Released2024-04-21
Parameters478.6B
VRAM957 GB for the weights

What it runs on

Memory and cards for snowflake-arctic-instruct (BF16)

957 GBweights, file size
143 MBcache per 1K tokens
620 MBruntime overhead, at least
4,096 tokenscontext max
CardRequests at onceContext maxMemory
4K each
RTX 3060 12 GB … 8× A100 80 GB
14 smaller cards
——
8× H200 141 GB
tensor parallel
201all 4K138 GB a card
8× B200 180 GB
tensor parallel
713all 4K176 GB a card
Memory needed at each load
Requests at once4K tokens each
1958 GB
5961 GB
8962 GB
16967 GB
32977 GB
64995 GB

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

From the model card

What Snowflake says about snowflake-arctic

Read the model card

Model Details

Arctic is a dense-MoE Hybrid transformer architecture pre-trained from scratch by the Snowflake AI Research Team. We are releasing model checkpoints for both the base and instruct-tuned versions of Arctic under an Apache-2.0 license. This means you can use them freely in your own research, prototypes, and products. Please see our blog Snowflake Arctic: The Best LLM for Enterprise AI — Efficiently Intelligent, Truly Open for more information on Arctic and links to other relevant resources such as our series of cookbooks covering topics around training your own custom MoE models, how to produce high-quality training data, and much more.

For the latest details about Snowflake Arctic including tutorials, etc., please refer to our GitHub repo:

  • https://github.com/Snowflake-Labs/snowflake-arctic

Try a live demo with our Streamlit app.

Model developers Snowflake AI Research Team

License Apache-2.0

Input Models input text only.

Output Models generate text and code only.

Model Release Date April, 24th 2024.

Model Architecture

Arctic combines a 10B dense transformer model with a residual 128x3.66B MoE MLP resulting in 480B total and 17B active parameters chosen using a top-2 gating. For more details about Arctic's model Architecture, training process, data, etc. see our series of cookbooks.

Usage

Arctic is currently supported with transformers by leveraging the custom code feature, to use this you simply need to add trust_remote_code=True to your AutoTokenizer and AutoModelForCausalLM calls. However, we recommend that you use a transformers version at or above 4.39:

pip install transformers>=4.39.0

Arctic leverages several features from DeepSpeed, you will need to install the DeepSpeed 0.14.2 or higher to get all of these required features:

pip install deepspeed>=0.14.2

Inference examples

Due to the model size we recommend using a single 8xH100 instance from your favorite cloud provider such as: AWS p5.48xlarge, Azure ND96isr_H100_v5, etc.

In this example we are using FP8 quantization provided by DeepSpeed in the backend, we can also use FP6 quantization by specifying q_bits=6 in the QuantizationConfig config. The "150GiB" setting for max_memory is required until we can get DeepSpeed's FP quantization supported natively as a HFQuantizer which we are actively working on.

import os
# enable hf_transfer for faster ckpt download
os.environ["HF_HUB_ENABLE_HF_TRANSFER"] = "1"

import torch
from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM, AutoTokenizer
from deepspeed.linear.config import QuantizationConfig

tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(
    "Snowflake/snowflake-arctic-instruct",
    trust_remote_code=True
)
quant_config = QuantizationConfig(q_bits=8)

model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained(
    "Snowflake/snowflake-arctic-instruct",
    trust_remote_code=True,
    low_cpu_mem_usage=True,
    device_map="auto",
    ds_quantization_config=quant_config,
    max_memory={i: "150GiB" for i in range(8)},
    torch_dtype=torch.bfloat16)

content = "5x + 35 = 7x - 60 + 10. Solve for x"
messages = [{"role": "user", "content": content}]
input_ids = tokenizer.apply_chat_template(messages, add_generation_prompt=True, return_tensors="pt").to("cuda")

outputs = model.generate(input_ids=input_ids, max_new_tokens=256)
print(tokenizer.decode(outputs[0]))

The Arctic GitHub page has additional code snippets and examples around running inference:

  • Example with pure-HF: https://github.com/Snowflake-Labs/snowflake-arctic/blob/main/inference
  • Tutorial using vLLM: https://github.com/Snowflake-Labs/snowflake-arctic/tree/main/inference/vllm

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

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