IBM ships Granite Switch 4.1.1: only the adapters and speech model were retrained, the base model is unchanged and no migration is needed
A patch release a little over a week after 4.1, showing models updated like software: only the parts that needed improving were swapped.
// Key points
- Granite Switch is a modular architecture that mounts cache-efficient specialized adapters on one model, serving several capabilities from a single endpoint; this release builds on granite-switch-4.1-30b.
- Only a new speech recognition model, granite-speech-5.0-470m-turboctc (10 languages, built-in punctuation and capitalization), and an updated Decision adapter were trained; the base model was not changed.
- Fully backward compatible with 4.1 with no migration; IBM plans tutorials and an Adapter SDK so developers and third parties can build and version their own adapters.
Builder's takeThere are no scores this time; what is worth watching is the release model: base unchanged, adapters swapped, which means most of your production eval baseline does not need rerunning. If you already mount LoRA-style adapters per feature, version and regression-test each adapter on its own instead of upgrading the whole model every time.
// Background · from #Open models
Full timeline →- Oct 30 Mistral opens the weights of Mistral Large 4: an MoE of about 1T parameters, priced at $0.70 input and $2.10 output per million tokens on the API
- Oct 30 Hugging Face releases AnySpeechRecognizer and AnyDecisionModel: swap in local speech models like Parakeet on Apple devices, with Parakeet Unified at a 1.43% word error rate
- Oct 29 NVIDIA opens Nemotron 3.5 Transcribe: one model for transcription in 40 languages, translation, speaker labels and audio Q&A, first among open-weight models on the Open ASR English leaderboard