Granite 4 model releases

The smallest member of IBM's Granite 4.2 open reasoning family, released Aug 25 2026 under Apache-2.0 (ibm-granite/granite-4.2-3b; reports ~4B parameters on Hugging Face) and aimed at local / edge deployment. A dense, decoder-only transformer with the family's thinking / non-thinking switch and low-effort thinking mode, pre-trained from scratch on ~15T tokens with a five-phase curriculum (context extended to a claimed 512K; shipped configuration 131,072 tokens), then SFT on reasoning data and multi-stage RL. Supports native tool calling. Open weights on Hugging Face, Ollama, and GitHub; no hosted list price at launch.

The mid-size member of IBM's Granite 4.2 open reasoning family, released Aug 25 2026 under Apache-2.0 (ibm-granite/granite-4.2-8b; reports ~9B parameters on Hugging Face). A dense, decoder-only transformer sharing the family's thinking / non-thinking switch and low-effort thinking mode, pre-trained from scratch on ~15T tokens with a five-phase curriculum (context extended to a claimed 512K; shipped configuration 131,072 tokens), then SFT on reasoning/agentic-trajectory data and multi-stage RL. Like the 30B, it is trained to call tools and act inside real sandboxed environments for multi-step software-engineering, terminal, and search-driven tasks. Open weights on Hugging Face, Ollama, and GitHub; no hosted list price at launch.

The flagship of IBM's Granite 4.2 family, released Aug 25 2026 under Apache-2.0 (ibm-granite/granite-4.2-30b; reports ~29B parameters on Hugging Face). A dense, decoder-only transformer with a thinking / non-thinking switch so one checkpoint can either reason step by step or answer directly, plus a low-effort thinking mode that caps the reasoning budget on easy queries. Pre-trained from scratch on ~15T tokens with a five-phase curriculum that extends context to a claimed 512K (shipped configuration 131,072 tokens), then supervised fine-tuned on chain-of-thought / reasoning / agentic-trajectory data and post-trained with multi-stage RL. Aimed squarely at agent work — native tool calling, multi-step software engineering, terminal tasks, and search-driven workflows — with the 8B and 30B trained to act with tools inside real sandboxed environments. Open weights on Hugging Face, Ollama, and GitHub; no per-token hosted list price at launch.