Side-by-side comparison of IBM Granite 4.1 8B (IBM · USA) and Llama 3.1 8B Instruct (Meta Platforms · United States) for self-hosted deployment of the open-weight model. IBM Granite 4.1 8B is rated EU-ready; Llama 3.1 8B Instruct is conditional. They part ways on licence: IBM Granite 4.1 8B is "Apache 2.0", Llama 3.1 8B Instruct is "Llama 3.1 Community Licence".
| Field | ||
|---|---|---|
| Summary | ||
| Verdict | EU-ready Per the published model card, Granite 4.1 8B is an Apache 2.0 9B-parameter dense decoder with a 131k-token context, sourced from publicly-available datasets, internal synthetic data and human-curated material. IBM continues the unusual-for-the-industry training-data transparency that anchored the Granite 3 family, and offers IP indemnification when the model is consumed via watsonx — a strong default for regulated enterprise pilots that need a defensible weights-available alternative to hyperscaler frontier models. | Conditional Per current documentation, Llama 3.1 8B Instruct is released under the Llama 3.1 Community Licence — a custom source-available licence rather than OSI open source. Commercial deployment is permitted below 700M MAU subject to the Acceptable Use Policy and attribution rules, but training-data opacity and US origin create EU AI Act transparency and data-transfer gaps that deployers should document. |
| Last reviewed | 2026-05-03 | 2026-04-17 |
| Open-weight | ||
| Licence | Apache 2.0 | Llama 3.1 Community Licence |
| Commercial use | Unrestricted | Restricted (MAU cap + AUP) |
| Training data | Disclosed | Token count only |
| Origin | USA | United States |
| Performance & pricing? | ||
| Quality index | — | 12/100 |
| Speed | — | 160 tok/s |
| Blended price | — | $0.10/M |
| Context window | — | — |
| Evidence | ||
| Sources | ||
No overlapping sources between the two entries.