LocalLLaMA paid attention to Granite 4.1 because IBM went in the opposite direction from giant reasoning hype: a broad release built around dense 3B, 8B, and 30B language models tuned for instruction following and tool calling. Comments welcomed the extra competition, but also pushed back on how strong the benchmarks really are.
A LocalLLaMA post points to IBM's Granite-4.0-3B-Vision, a compact VLM built for charts, tables, and document key-value extraction rather than generic multimodal chat.
IBM Granite on 2026-03-20 released Mellea 0.4.0 and three Granite Libraries built around Granite 4.0 Micro. The release is aimed at teams that want more structured, schema-safe, and safety-aware agentic RAG pipelines instead of depending on prompt-only orchestration.
IBM unveiled Granite 4.0 1B Speech on March 9, 2026 as a compact multilingual speech-language model for ASR and bidirectional speech translation. The company says it improves English transcription accuracy over its predecessor while cutting model size in half and adding Japanese support.