IBM Releases Granite 4.2: Bringing Native Reasoning and Agentic RL to Open Enterprise Models
IBM has released Granite 4.2, a family of open reasoning language models in 3B, 8B, and 30B parameter sizes. Unlike earlier Granite releases, which were instruction-following assistants, Granite 4.2 is built around explicit reasoning. Every model can emit a chain of thought before answering, and every model exposes a thinking / non-thinking switch plus a low-effort mode that spends a short reasoning budget on easy questions. The models are decoder-only dense transformers, pre-trained from scrat
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IBM released Granite 4.2, a family of open-source reasoning language models available in three sizes that can show their thinking process before answering questions. Unlike earlier versions, these models include agentic reinforcement learning capabilities that allow the larger models to edit code, use terminal commands, and perform web searches in sandboxed environments. The models are free to download and use commercially under Apache 2.0 licensing, making them deployable across different scales from individual developers on laptops to enterprises with high-end GPU infrastructure. The release also includes smaller speech recognition models designed for transcription applications in industries like software development, finance, healthcare, and customer service.
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