IBM expands Granite Model family of LLM with Granite 3.2

IBM has introduced the next generation of its Granite Model Family of large language models (LLM)—Granite 3.2. The tech giant has unveiled the new model with an aim to offer efficient and practical AI solutions for businesses. The new Granite 3.2 models are available under the Apache 2.0 license on Hugging Face, while select models are available on platforms and tools such as IBM Watsonx.ai, Ollama, Replicate, and LM Studio.

The new models come with capabilities like vision language model (VLM) and chain of thought. VLM enables the model to perform document understanding tasks. Its performance exceeded significantly when compared to Pixtral 12B and Llama 3.2 11B on key enterprise benchmarks such as DocVQA, ChartQA, AI2D, and OCRBench. The company said that it has used its own open-source DocLing toolkit to process 85 million PDFs and generated 26 million synthetic question-answer pairs to enhance the VLM’s ability to handle complex document-heavy workflows.

“IBM’s latest Granite developments focus on open solutions and demonstrate another step forward in making AI more accessible, cost-effective, and valuable for modern enterprises,” said Sriram Raghavan, VP, IBM AI Research.

IBM further states that with novel inference scaling methods, the Granite 3.2 8B can be calibrated to rival the performance of bigger models like Claude 3.5 Sonnet and GPT-4o in math and reasoning benchmarks like AIME 2024 and Math 500.