IBM Granite 4.2 8B

Granite-4.2-8B is the middle size of IBM's Granite 4.2 reasoning family, published on 25 August 2026 alongside the 3B and the 30B. It shares everything conceptually important with the flagship - the built-in chain of thought in <think> tags, the three switchable thinking modes, the plain Apache 2.0 licence - in a package that fits on a single consumer graphics card. The interesting number is SWE-bench Verified. IBM reports 47.67 for the 8B, against 57 for the model nearly four times its size. Software-repair benchmarks used to be the preserve of frontier systems, and a model of this size resolving almost half of them says more about how far post-training has come than any chat score does. The reasoning results follow the same shape: 86.67 on AIME25 and 64.14 on GPQA against the 30B's 89.17 and 66.41. Where the gap really opens is long documents and agentic coding under pressure - RULER at 128K drops to 71.41 from the 30B's 81.38, and SWE-bench Pro to 19.11 from 33.29. Architecturally it is a dense 40-layer transformer with grouped query attention, 4096-wide embeddings and a 12800 MLP, trained in bfloat16 from Granite-4.1-8B-Base. IBM publishes its own GGUF, FP8, MXFP4 and NVFP4 conversions next to the full weights, which is why the quantised repository is pulled several times more often than the original: roughly 70 thousand downloads a month against nine thousand. It is also the only member of the family available to rent rather than host. As of 31 August 2026 resellers list the 8B at about ten cents per million input tokens and fifteen per million output - cheap enough that the choice between running it yourself and calling it is a question of data policy rather than money. The licence carries no territorial exclusion, so a European company is free on both counts. As with the rest of the family, Polish is not on IBM's list of twelve tested languages.

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IBM's new open models have a thinking dial - and no European exception in the licence

8/31/2026 · IBM Granite Team (karta modelu i blog techniczny Granite 4.2)

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