ThursdAI — the weekly AI news podcast hosted by Alex Volkov — has covered 4 IBM releases since Sep 2025, most recently Granite Speech 5.0 Turbo CTC on Aug 27, 2026. Highlights include Granite Docling 258M, Granite 4.0 Nano, Granite 4.1. All 4 shipped with open weights. Every entry below has primary-source links and the episode segment where we covered it live, plus key numbers where we have them.
IBM Granite Speech 5.0 Turbo CTC: 470M encoder-only ASR at 12,600+ RTFx
IBM released Granite Speech 5.0 Turbo CTC, a 470M-parameter encoder-only English ASR model under Apache 2.0. It reports 4.85% WER with throughput above 12,600 RTFx on an H200 — built for the fast, cheap end of the transcription spectrum.
IBM Granite 4.1: dense non-thinking models with top tool calling
IBM released the Granite 4.1 family (3B/8B/30B), dense non-thinking models under Apache 2.0 with best-in-class tool calling, scoring 73 on BFCL with just 8B parameters. IBM claims 20x token efficiency over Qwen3.5 9B, and the models are live on W&B Inference at $0.05/$0.10 per million input/output tokens with 128K context.
IBM Granite 4.0 Nano: ultra-efficient tiny models for edge deployment
IBM released Granite 4.0 Nano, a set of ultra-efficient tiny open models aimed at edge deployment. The release continues the trend of capable sub-billion-to-few-billion parameter models that can run locally on constrained hardware.
IBM releases Granite Docling 258M compact document-parsing VLM
IBM published Granite Docling 258M, an ultra-compact open-source vision-language model for document understanding that converts documents into structured output. At just 258M parameters it reinforced the show's point that tiny specialized models are becoming genuinely useful workflow tools.
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