IBM Granite 4.1

IBM's refreshed open-weights enterprise family — three dense decoder-only sizes, Apache 2.0, trained on ~15T tokens with progressive annealing toward technical/scientific/mathematical data plus instruction-following. The 8B instruct claims to match the prior Granite 4.0 32B-A9B MoE flagship on IBM's own benchmarks; cross-vendor comparison (vs Qwen/Gemma/Mistral) is unverified at time of publication.

License: Apache 2.0 · Context: 128K default; 512K via late-training context-extension stage · Released: April 29, 2026

3B: PARAMETERS
DENSE: TYPE
128K: CONTEXT
~2.1 GB (3B) / ~5.3 GB (8B) / ~17 GB (30B) — Ollama Q4_K_M: VRAM AT Q4

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The call

IBM's refreshed open-weights enterprise family — three dense decoder-only sizes, Apache 2.0, trained on ~15T tokens with progressive annealing toward technical/scientific/mathematical data plus instruction-following. The 8B instruct claims to match the prior Granite 4.0 32B-A9B MoE flagship on IBM's own benchmarks; cross-vendor comparison (vs Qwen/Gemma/Mistral) is unverified at time of publication.
When not to use: Frontier reasoning or coding-agent workflows where Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B or GLM-5.1 are the established daily drivers. Granite 4.1 is positioned as enterprise-deploy-friendly (clean Apache 2.0, IBM support story, traceable training data) rather than benchmark-chasing.

Runner notes

Ollama tags live same-day: `granite4.1:3b`, `granite4.1:8b`, `granite4.1:30b`. Default tags ship at 128K context — 512K requires the extended-context training-stage variants from `huggingface.co/ibm-granite`. Q4_K_M is the Ollama default; Q8_0 available via `:8b-q8_0` etc. HuggingFace hosting at `ibm-granite/granite-4.1-*-instruct`.

License: Apache 2.0
Released: April 29, 2026
Maker: IBM Research

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