Journey of Granite: IBM's Pioneering Path in AI Foundation Models

Written by: Vrunda Gadesha

IBM has long been at the forefront of technological innovation, and its Granite series of AI foundation models is a testament to its commitment to driving enterprise-focused advancements in artificial intelligence. From its inception in late 2023 to the recent breakthroughs in 2024, the Granite models have showcased IBM’s dedication to building powerful, transparent, and adaptable AI solutions. Let’s explore the milestones that define the journey of Granite.

Laying the Foundation: September 2023

The Granite series made its debut in September 2023, when IBM announced the general availability of the first Granite models. These models were built specifically to integrate generative AI into business workflows, ensuring businesses could leverage advanced AI tools to enhance productivity, automate tasks, and glean insights. By emphasizing enterprise use, IBM positioned the Granite models as reliable and secure, addressing concerns about data privacy and model governance.

Advancing Conversational AI: November 2023

As AI's conversational applications grew, IBM released the Granite 13B Chat V2 model in November 2023. Trained on a staggering 2.5 trillion tokens, this model excelled in chat-oriented tasks, enabling more natural, context-aware interactions. This step underscored IBM's commitment to refining human-machine collaboration, ensuring enterprises could use AI to communicate more effectively with customers and stakeholders.

Scaling Up: March 2024

IBM took a significant leap forward in March 2024, unveiling the Granite 20B Multilingual model. Boasting 20 billion parameters, this transformer was designed to support multiple languages, including English, German, Spanish, French, and Portuguese. By incorporating multilingual capabilities, IBM expanded Granite’s relevance to global enterprises, fostering seamless communication across language barriers.

Empowering Open Source: May 2024

Recognizing the importance of community collaboration, IBM made a bold move in May 2024, by open-sourcing its Granite code models under the Apache 2.0 license. Hosting these models on platforms like Hugging Face allowed developers and researchers worldwide to access, modify, and build upon IBM's cutting-edge AI technology. This initiative reinforced IBM’s commitment to transparency and the democratization of AI.

Granite 3.0: Reaching New Heights in October 2024

The journey culminated in a groundbreaking announcement at the TechXchange event in October 2024, with the introduction of Granite 3.0: a family of open, performant, and trusted models. This iteration featured models ranging from sub-billion to 34 billion parameters, that span language, code, time series, and geospatial tasks. The models deliver powerful performance at lower computing costs for key enterprise use cases such as agentic support, Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), classification, summarization, and entity extraction. This third generation also introduced Granite Guardian models, providing the most comprehensive set of risk and harm detection capabilities available in the market. These advancements cemented Granite as a versatile and high-performing tool for modern businesses, adapting to diverse needs while maintaining efficiency.

The Next Frontier: Granite 3.1: Enhanced Performance and Long-Context Understanding

The Granite 3.1 models, released in December 2024, enhanced performance, extended the context length, improved security, and introduced new embedding models with multilingual support. A key breakthrough in this release is the expansion of the context window to 128,000 tokens, allowing businesses to process significantly larger documents with improved comprehension and analysis.

Additionally, Granite Guardian 3.1 introduced a new layer of AI governance with hallucination detection capabilities in function calling, ensuring more reliable and trustworthy AI outputs. This innovation is particularly crucial for enterprises prioritizing AI safety and control in mission-critical applications.

The Road Ahead

The evolution of IBM's Granite series highlights commitment to advancing AI for enterprises. With a clear commitment to providing open, performant, and trusted models, the Granite family represents IBM’s vision for AI’s role in empowering businesses worldwide.

As IBM continues to innovate, the Granite series stands as a benchmark for what AI can achieve in a rapidly transforming digital landscape. It is not just the journey of a product line; it’s the journey of progress, collaboration, and the endless possibilities of artificial intelligence.