IBM Granite
ibm’s open model family (language, vision, speech, guardian, embedding, time series), Apache 2.0 for the Granite 4.x line. The original note covered only the 2024 Granite Code models, which are now legacy.
Current language models: Granite 4.2 (released 2026-08-25)
- Sizes: 3B, 8B and 30B dense “thinking” models (ibm.com/granite, Hugging Face
ibm-granite; the three repos were updated about four weeks before 2026-10-01). - Granite-4.2-30B card: decoder-only dense transformer, 128K context (extendable to 512K; a third-party report says 131,072 tokens shipped), Apache 2.0, three thinking modes (full, off, low effort), 12 tested languages, trained from Granite-4.1-30B-Base with SFT then GRPO RL. Third-party summaries add about 15T pretraining tokens including 1T of synthetic code and agentic RL on the 8B and 30B only (not read from IBM).
- Focus: tool calling, multi-step software engineering, terminal and search-driven agent workflows (IBM; third-party coverage).
- Also current: Granite Speech 5.0 Turbo CTC (470M, transcription), Granite Time Series PatchTST-FM r2, and Vision, Guardian and Embedding families listed on ibm.com/granite.
- Availability (IBM): Hugging Face, Ollama, LM Studio, watsonx.ai, OpenRouter, Replicate and others.
- Trust claims (IBM, ibm.com/granite): Granite language models have ISO 42001 certification for IBM’s AI management system, with cryptographic signing of model artefacts. Vendor claim; the certificate was not checked (earlier note marked it unverified).
- No Granite 4.3 or Granite 5 appears on the Hugging Face org or IBM page as of 2026-10-01.
What changed in 2026
- Granite 4.0 (2025): hybrid Mamba/transformer dense and MoE models, micro to 8B, Apache 2.0, RAG, tool use, FIM code completion, JSON output (GitHub repo).
- Granite 4.1 (3B, 8B, 30B; Hugging Face org shows May 2026 updates; exact release date unverified).
- Granite 4.2 (2026-08-25): switch to dense reasoning models with switchable thinking; this is the current line.
Legacy
Granite Code Models collection (2024); earlier note said they were “supposedly good at coding”. Prefer Granite 4.x.
Open items
- Minor, not blocking OK: IBM benchmark claims, exact Granite 4.1 date and ISO 42001 certificate scope are vendor-stated or unverified.
Sources (accessed 2026-10-01)
- https://www.ibm.com/granite
- https://huggingface.co/ibm-granite
- https://huggingface.co/ibm-granite/granite-4.2-30B (checked 2026-09-30)
- https://github.com/ibm-granite/granite-4.0-language-models (checked 2026-09-30)
- Search summary: datanorth.ai, unite.ai, eesel.ai Granite 4.2 coverage (release date, token counts)