Granite 4.2 8B

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.