IBM's most-used model is the one it replaced a week ago — and by 30 to 1

IBM published the Granite 4.2 family on 25 August 2026: three sizes, a switchable thinking mode, Apache 2.0. A week later the download counters say the audience has not moved. The figures come from the Hugging Face API, read on 1 September 2026. Granite-4.1-8B — the April model that 4.2 was built on top of — was pulled about 1,177,000 times in the preceding thirty days. Granite-4.2-8B, over the same window, was pulled about 9,000 times. That headline ratio flatters the old model, and it is worth saying why. Hugging Face counts only the last thirty days, and the 4.2 weights had been public for seven of them. Corrected for that, the comparison is roughly 39,000 downloads a day for the 4.1 model against 1,300 for its successor: still thirty to one, not a hundred and thirty. The quantised GGUF builds of 4.2, which many people actually run, add about 3,500 a day. Even at thirty to one, the gap says something the benchmark tables do not. Granite 4.1 has no reasoning mode, scores several points lower on almost every published test and was superseded by its own maker. What it has is time: four months of tutorials, container images, fine-tunes and internal approvals built on top of it. Weights are not a product you upgrade on release day — they are a dependency, and dependencies move slowly. There is a second reason. Granite 4.1 is what most of the newer stack is made of: IBM post-trained the 4.2 models from Granite 4.1 base weights. The old generation is not being kept alive out of inertia alone. wujec.ai has added profiles for all three Granite 4.1 sizes — 30B, 8B and 3B — alongside the 4.2 entries already in the catalogue. IBM has not announced a retirement date for the older line.