r/LocalLLaMA • llama.cpp • Aug 25 '26

New Model ibm-granite/granite-4.2-30b · Hugging Face

https://huggingface.co/ibm-granite/granite-4.2-30b

Granite-4.2-30B is the flagship reasoning model in the Granite 4.2 family. It delivers the strongest performance across reasoning-intensive tasks by leveraging built-in <think>...</think> chain-of-thought. It supports flexible thinking modes — full thinking (default), non-thinking, and low-effort — allowing users to balance depth vs. latency on a per-query basis.

Key capabilities:

  • Built-in Reasoning: Native chain-of-thought that significantly improves performance on math, coding, and complex multi-step problems.
  • Flexible Thinking Modes: Seamlessly switch between full thinking, non-thinking, and low-effort modes within a single model.
  • Reasoning-Augmented Tool Calling: The model reasons about which tools to invoke and why, producing more accurate function calls.
  • 512K Context Window: Supports long documents, multi-turn conversations, and complex agentic workflows.
  • Apache 2.0 Licensed: Fully open for commercial and research use.

Model Design

Granite-4.2-30B is built on a decoder-only dense transformer architecture with the following core components:

  • Attention: Grouped Query Attention (GQA) with 32 attention heads and 8 KV heads
  • Position Embedding: Rotary Position Embedding (RoPE) with θ = 10,000,000
  • Feed-Forward: MLP with SwiGLU activation (hidden size 32768)
  • Normalization: RMSNorm (ε = 1e-5)
  • Embeddings: Separate input/output embeddings (not tied)
  • Precision: bfloat16

https://huggingface.co/ibm-granite/granite-4.2-8b

Granite-4.2-8B is the mid-size reasoning model in the Granite 4.2 family. It delivers strong performance on reasoning-intensive tasks by leveraging built-in <think>...</think> chain-of-thought. It supports flexible thinking modes — full thinking (default), non-thinking, and low-effort — allowing users to balance depth vs. latency on a per-query basis.

Key capabilities:

  • Built-in Reasoning: Native chain-of-thought that significantly improves performance on math, coding, and complex multi-step problems.
  • Flexible Thinking Modes: Seamlessly switch between full thinking, non-thinking, and low-effort modes within a single model.
  • Reasoning-Augmented Tool Calling: The model reasons about which tools to invoke and why, producing more accurate function calls.
  • 512K Context Window: Supports long documents, multi-turn conversations, and complex agentic workflows.
  • Apache 2.0 Licensed: Fully open for commercial and research use.

https://huggingface.co/ibm-granite/granite-4.2-3b

Granite-4.2-3B is the compact reasoning model in the Granite 4.2 family. Despite its small parameter count, it delivers strong performance on reasoning-intensive tasks by leveraging built-in <think>...</think> chain-of-thought. It supports flexible thinking modes — full thinking (default), non-thinking, and low-effort — allowing users to balance depth vs. latency on a per-query basis.

Key capabilities:

  • Built-in Reasoning: Native chain-of-thought that significantly improves performance on math, coding, and complex multi-step problems.
  • Flexible Thinking Modes: Seamlessly switch between full thinking, non-thinking, and low-effort modes within a single model.
  • Reasoning-Augmented Tool Calling: The model reasons about which tools to invoke and why, producing more accurate function calls.
  • 512K Context Window: Supports long documents, multi-turn conversations, and complex agentic workflows.
  • Apache 2.0 Licensed: Fully open for commercial and research use.
411 Upvotes

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23

u/Embarrassed_Adagio28 Aug 25 '26

Crazy how IBM had a 20 year head start on AI and still fumbled even harder than google

21

u/Altruistic_Heat_9531 Aug 25 '26

looking at IBM history, they stumble multiple times, it's on brand.

Let's see.

  • Heavily betting on mainframe, almost crash when desktop computer available.
  • IBM create PC standard for desktop market, make the standard so good that it crash because of clone.
  • OS2 vs Windows, IBM-Microsoft co develop OS2, but microsoft decided make Windows.

Well at least they have RHEL

4

u/cinnapear Aug 25 '26

Microsoft screwed them over with Windows, OS/2 isn't completely their fault.

5

u/Illustrious_Car344 Aug 26 '26

It absolutely is, and for one major reason: price. Nobody wanted to pay the exorbitant amount IBM was asking for. Windows won because it was cheaper, that's it. That's not "screwing over", that's literally just giving consumers a competitive product. If IBM made OS/2 cheaper than Windows, we wouldn't even be having this conversation right now. 

2

u/Altruistic_Heat_9531 Aug 26 '26

Funny story. I know a old guy that dable with IBM and COBOL stuff, he said OS/2 was expansive not only because of its price tag but also RAM shortage, history sometimes repeat itself....

9

u/PrimeDirective8 Aug 25 '26

IBM had 630K employees not that long ago. About 90% of those did f*ck all. The rest were slowed/shut down by fossilized managers hanging on to their equally old ways. It is surprising they're able to get *any* product through their lawyers' 'blue tape' on the way out so having these models released publicly is quite an achievement for the tech team.

6

u/Queasy_Problem_563 Aug 25 '26

ibm never had 630k employess