Granite 3.3

Granite 3.3 is IBM's April 2025 refresh of its open Granite language model line. The headline 8B instruct variant is a decoder-only model with a 128K-token context window, released under the Apache 2.0 license with weights on Hugging Face and deployment listings on AWS Marketplace. The 3.3 line also ships 2B base and instruct variants plus base models, all trained on IBM's enterprise-focused data mix.

Its signature feature is structured thinking: the instruct models can expose their reasoning inside <think></think> tags before the final <response></response>, giving developers a controllable window into the model's process. The base models support fill-in-the-middle for code completion, and the family covers 12 languages. As an open-weight 8B model it is positioned as a practical enterprise alternative to closed APIs: fine-tunable, self-hostable, and commercially usable under Apache 2.0.