This post was originally published by [email protected] (Carl Franzen) on Venture Beat.
In an industry where model size is often seen as a proxy for intelligence, IBM is charting a different course — one that values efficiency over enormity, and accessibility over abstraction.
The 114-year-old tech giant’s four new Granite 4.0 Nano models, released today, range from just 350 million to 1.5 billion parameters, a fraction of the size of their server-bound cousins from the likes of OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.
These models are designed to be highly accessible: the 350M variants can run comfortably on a modern laptop CPU with 8–16GB of RAM, while the 1.5B models typically require a GPU with
