Granite 3.3 8B

Granite 3.3 8B Base is IBM's April 16, 2025 update to its enterprise-focused open language model line, released under Apache 2.0 on Hugging Face. The decoder-only base model carries a 128K-token context window and adds fill-in-the-middle generation with specialized tokens, which makes it useful for code completion workloads as well as the summarization, extraction, and RAG tasks Granite targets. It supports a dozen languages including English, German, Spanish, French, Japanese, and Chinese.

The honest picture: as a base (non-instruction-tuned) model it is a starting point for fine-tuning rather than a chat-ready assistant; most users should reach for Granite 3.3 8B Instruct instead. The instruct variant is the one that serves as the foundation for Granite Speech 3.3 and the Guardian safety models. IBM's governance story (training-data transparency, watsonx integration) is the real differentiator here versus similarly sized community models.