IBM announced the release of Granite 3.0, its purpose-built generative AI model aimed specifically at business applications.

Granite 3.0 is the latest, and most advanced, AI model from IBM. The company has released it under the permissive Apache 2.0 license, giving organizations significantly more flexibility than some competing platforms. The company touts Granite’s performance as on par or exceeding similar models.

IBM’s third-generation Granite flagship language models can outperform or match similarly sized models from leading model providers on many academic and industry benchmarks, showcasing strong performance, transparency and safety.

IBM emphasizes Granite’s focus on the enterprise, including how the AI model is trained.

The new Granite 3.0 8B and 2B language models are designed as ‘workhorse’ models for enterprise AI, delivering strong performance for tasks such as Retrieval Augmented Geneneration (RAG), classification, summarization, entity extraction, and tool use. These compact, versatile models are designed to be fine-tuned with enterprise data and seamlessly integrated across diverse business environments or workflows.

While many large language models (LLMs) are trained on publicly available data, a vast majority of enterprise data remains untapped. By combining a small Granite model with enterprise data, especially using the revolutionary alignment technique InstructLab – introduced by IBM and RedHat in May – IBM believes businesses can achieve task-specific performance that rivals larger models at a fraction of the cost (based on an observed range of 3x-23x less cost than large frontier models in several early proofs-of-concept1).

The Granite 3.0 release reaffirms IBM’s commitment to building transparency, safety, and trust in AI products. The Granite 3.0 technical report and responsible use guide provide a description of the datasets used to train these models, details of the filtering, cleansing, and curation steps applied, along with comprehensive results of model performance across major academic and enterprise benchmarks.

The company says it is focused on building AI models that offer a level of autonomy many competitors don’t.

IBM is focused on developing AI agent technologies which are capable of greater autonomy, sophisticated reasoning and multi-step problem solving. The initial release of the Granite 3.0 8B model features support for key agentic capabilities, such as advanced reasoning and a highly-structured chat template and prompting style for implementing tool use workflows. IBM also plans to introduce a new AI agent chat feature to IBM watsonx Orchestrate, which uses agentic capabilities to orchestrate AI Assistants, skills, and automations that help users increase productivity across their teams.8 IBM plans to continue building agent capabilities across its portfolio in 2025, including pre-built agents for specific domains and use-cases.

Organization interested in learning more can visit https://www.ibm.com/granite.