Granite 3.1: What Non-Developers Need to Know

Written by Rodrigo Andrade , Senior Product Manager, Data and AI

IBM has recently announced Granite 3.1, the latest update to the suite of open, high-performance AI models designed specifically for business applications. If the technical jargon surrounding foundation models feels overwhelming, don’t worry—I’ll break down why this announcement is important for various industries and how it can benefit your business.

Quick Summary: Why Granite?

• Tailored: Each model in the Granite family is designed for specific applications, enabling businesses to select the best model for their unique needs.
• Enhanced Safety: The introduction of Granite Guardian helps ensure responsible AI usage, minimizing risks related to data privacy and ethical considerations.
• Cost Efficiency: By optimizing performance for targeted tasks, businesses can achieve significant savings in time and resources.
• User-Friendly Customization: Thanks to InstructLab, even non-technical users can easily customize models. InstructLab enhances human-curated data with high-quality examples generated by a large language model, reducing the cost and complexity of this task. This generated data can then be used to fine-tune models without extensive retraining, further driving cost savings.
• Open Source and Transparency: Granite 3.1 is open-sourced under the Apache 2.0 license, fostering trust and enabling businesses to understand how these models are constructed and the data they use.
• 128K Token Context Length: Granite 3.1 introduces a powerful 128K token context length, allowing models to process and understand massive amounts of text in a single session. This enhancement is ideal for handling complex, large-scale data such as entire books, long legal documents, or multi-hour conversations—all while maintaining context and coherence.

What Are Granite Models?

Granite is a family of AI models specifically engineered for business applications. Built from the ground up, these models are designed to ensure trust and scalability in AI-driven solutions, making them highly relevant for a wide range of tasks.?

What Does "Purpose-Built for Business" Mean?

Granite models are specifically optimized for the challenges businesses face every day. Fine-tuned for specific tasks, such as document summarization, data extraction, forecasting, and content generation, Granite’s capabilities are invaluable. It also supports code-related tasks like generation, explanation, and editing, which is particularly useful for tech and software development enterprises.

How Can Granite Help Your Business?

While many think of large language models (LLMs) as primarily AI agents or assistants answering questions, Granite excels in a variety of applications, embedded in conversational experiences or not. Here are some examples that you can use as inspiration to idealize how Granite can help your business:

• Text Summarization: Quickly condense lengthy documents or reports.
• Text Analytics & Extraction: Identify key insights, for example, from customer feedback or legal documents, to uncover trends or critical information.
• Content Generation: Automatically produce texts, emails, product descriptions, internal reports and more
• Classification: Sort emails, support tickets, documents or others by topic or urgency.
• Time-Series Forecasting: Predict future sales trends based on historical data, aiding in inventory planning and demand forecasting; analyze system performance data to foresee maintenance needs.
• Agriculture & Resource Management: Estimate total living and dead plant biomass in specific areas, quantify carbon sequestration in reforestation projects, track biomass changes in ecosystems using satellite imagery.?

How Will Granite Access Relevant Information for My Business?

Each business has unique sources of information, whether external URLs or internal data not publicly available. The key area here is Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), which enables models to retrieve and integrate relevant information from external sources into AI-generated responses. This capability is particularly useful in scenarios where accuracy and context are crucial.?

How Is Granite Cost-Effective?

IBM’s Granite models are smaller, which demands less computational power. When small models are combined with proprietary enterprise data via fine tuning, task-specific performance often equals or exceeds that of the state-of the-art large models. This translates to cost efficiency for enterprises. By offering a range of models, including smaller, specialized versions, IBM allows businesses to select models that meet their specific needs without over-investing in computational resources. Additionally, the ability to customize models through IBM’s InstructLab platform further optimizes costs.

Why Choose Granite Over Other Well-Known Models?

IBM Granite stands out by offering a suite of open, performant, and trusted AI models designed to accelerate enterprise AI adoption. Key advantages include:

• Open: Foster innovation across various platforms, enhancing developer efficiency with models tailored to your business needs and data.
• Performant: Build high-performing, cost-effective AI applications with models designed for scalability and superior performance across various tasks.
• Trusted: Ensure responsible AI deployment with comprehensive risk and harm detection capabilities, transparency, and intellectual property protection.

What is new in Granite 3.1?

Granite 3.1 brings exciting updates. One of the most powerful enhancements is that, starting with this version, models now support a 128K token context length. If you’re not sure what that means, don’t worry—I’ll explain. This means Granite 3.1 can now process and understand massive amounts of text in a single go. Whether it’s analyzing entire books, making sense of lengthy legal documents, or managing multi-hour conversations without losing context. For example, imagine being able to feed the model a complete annual business report and getting actionable insights in one shot. Or handling customer service logs from thousands of interactions to uncover trends, all with perfect coherence. This unlocks endless possibilities for businesses working with complex or large-scale data.

But that’s not all! Granite 3.1 also introduces function calling hallucination detection for increased control and observability of agents making tool calls. It can now detect hallucinations that might occur in an agentic workflow, affording the same accountability and trust to function calling that we already provide for RAG.

It is also bringing 4 new Granite embedding models with multilingual support across 12 languages. This helps businesses extract smarter insights across global markets.

• Granite-Embedding-30M-English
• Granite-Embedding-125M-English
• Granite-Embedding-107M-Multilingual
• Granite-Embedding-278M-Multilingual

Another exciting update is that Granite 3.1 models are now available in IBM watsonx.ai, as well as through platform partners including Docker, Hugging Face, LM Studio, Ollama, and Replicate. read more about Granite 3.1: https://ibm.biz/BdGydP

Where to Start?

If your company lacks an in-house AI team or is unsure where to begin with AI implementation, you can rely on IBM or its trusted partners for guidance. IBM Consulting? collaborates with global clients and partners to co-create innovative AI solutions tailored to your specific needs. With a diverse team of over 20,000 AI experts, IBM Consulting can help you design and scale cutting-edge AI solutions and automation across your business confidently. Their services combine deep industry expertise with AI technology to augment—not replace—your team, enhancing both their skills and the overall value of your work.

Conclusion

IBM's Granite 3.1 is more than just another tech release; it’s an advancement to our comprehensive suite of AI models tailored for business users. By leveraging its diverse models, organizations can streamline operations, enhance decision-making, and ensure ethical AI usage—all essential for staying competitive in today’s market.

Whether you’re in customer service, marketing, product development, or data analysis, Granite 3.1 equips you with what you need to innovate and thrive. By integrating it, you can discover new opportunities and accelerate your business's growth in an increasingly AI-focused world

To know more about Granite 3.1 and the new models announced, visit: https://ibm.biz/BdGydP