What is IBM Granite and what is it used for?
IBM Granite is IBM's family of open AI models for business use, with language, vision, speech, embedding and guardrail models that a team can customize and deploy itself.
According to the official Granite page, the family includes:
- Language models, in 3B, 8B and 30B parameter sizes in the Granite 4.1 generation, as base and instruct versions.
- Granite Vision, for understanding documents and images, and Granite Vision Embedding, a multimodal embedding model for document retrieval.
- Granite Speech, for speech transcription.
- Granite Embedding, with text embedding models and a reranker model.
- Granite Guardian, which detects malicious content and harmful outputs.
- Granite Time Series, a compact family of time series models called Tiny Time Mixers.
IBM states the models are open source under the Apache 2.0 license and that the released language, vision, speech, embedding and guardian models have been cryptographically signed as of April 29, 2026. The Granite 4.0 documentation adds that it was the first open model family certified under ISO 42001.
