IBM Granite
IBM's family of open-weight foundation models, released under the Apache 2.0 license, that underpins watsonx.ai and serves as the base model fine-tuned for RPG and IBM i in watsonx Code Assistant for i and IBM Bob.
Granite releases
| Version | Date | What changed |
|---|---|---|
| Granite 3.0 | Oct 21, 2024 | Open source. General-purpose and Mixture-of-Experts models from about 400 million to 8 billion parameters |
| Granite 4.0 | Oct 2, 2025 | Hybrid Mamba-2 and transformer design in H-Small, H-Tiny and H-Micro. Over 70 percent less memory for long-context inference |
| Granite 4.2 | Aug 25, 2026 | Dense, decoder-only reasoning models in 3B, 8B and 30B sizes |
Granite and IBM i
IBM said watsonx Code Assistant for i was built on a flagship Granite code model fine-tuned for RPG and IBM i. It was trained on more than 10 million lines of RPG plus IBM Redbooks and community material.
IBM Bob, the coding agent that replaced it, draws on Granite alongside Meta's Llama and Mistral models rather than Granite alone.
Related Terms
watsonx.ai
The studio component of watsonx for building, tuning, and deploying foundation models and generative AI applications, including retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) against enterprise data.
watsonx Code Assistant for i
IBM's November 2025 preview announcement of an AI code assistant purpose-built for RPG on IBM i. The preview track was superseded by IBM Bob, which reached general availability in March 2026.
IBM Bob (Project Bob)
IBM's generally available AI coding agent for IBM i, built as a fork of Visual Studio Code and tuned for RPG, CL, DDS, and SQL. Reached GA on March 24, 2026; Bob 2.0 and the IBM i-specific Bob Premium Package for i shipped June 24, 2026.
Foundation Model
A large, general-purpose AI model trained on broad data and then adapted, through prompting, tuning, or fine-tuning, to specific tasks such as RPG code generation.
RPG
Report Program Generator, the primary business application programming language on IBM i and its AS/400 predecessors, still running the majority of production logic in most IBM i shops.