IBM Granite

IBM Granite is IBM's family of foundation models, first released with watsonx in 2023 and made open source under the Apache 2.0 license starting with Granite 3.0 on October 21, 2024 (general-purpose and Mixture-of-Experts variants from about 400 million to 8 billion parameters). Granite 4.0 followed on October 2, 2025 with a hybrid Mamba-2/transformer architecture across H-Small, H-Tiny and H-Micro variants, cutting memory use by more than 70 percent for long-context inference, and Granite 4.2 shipped August 25, 2026 as a dense, decoder-only reasoning family in 3B, 8B and 30B sizes. For IBM i, IBM stated that watsonx Code Assistant for i was built on a flagship Granite code model fine-tuned for RPG and IBM i, trained on more than 10 million lines of RPG code plus IBM Redbooks and community-contributed material. IBM Bob, the successor coding agent, draws on Granite models alongside Meta's Llama and Mistral models rather than Granite alone.