IBM releases Granite Switch 4.1 in 8B and 30B: chat, decisions and speech-to-text from one endpoint, using about the base model’s VRAM
Decision models as composable adapters, so one GPU footprint covers three jobs.
// Key points
- Granite-Switch-4.1-8B and -30B include a general Decision aLoRA, a safety-focused Guardian aLoRA and Granite-Speech-5.0-Turbo-CTC, the fastest ASR model on the OpenASR leaderboard.
- All three are composed with the base model into one model using about the same VRAM as the base alone, and the adapters reuse the base model’s KV cache.
- IBM says the Guardian aLoRA on average outperforms Jev 1.13, Microsoft-Decision-1, GPT-Luna-Decisions and Clef-Flash on safety-related decision tasks.
- Users can compose their own Switch model from Granite Libraries adapters, and IBM plans an adapter-training SDK in Mellea.
Builder's takeDecision models keep piling up this week, and Granite’s approach is the cheapest: instead of a separate model per classifier, one base with many adapters. For content moderation and file classification in AI Cloud Drive I’d try the 8B first and measure how much latency drops when one upload triggers several decisions over a shared KV cache.
// Background · from #Open models
Full timeline →- Oct 17 Reflection opens Beam under Apache 2.0: a 501B-total, 23B-active MoE for coding and agents with a 1M context
- Oct 17 Black Forest Labs opens FLUX.3 Image Klein: text-to-image, multi-reference editing and bounding-box layout in one model, about 2 seconds per 1024 image on an H100
- Oct 16 Meta releases open weights for Muse Spark Open, an 816B-total, 42B-active multimodal MoE with a 1M context