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Granite 4.1 3B SVG Pelican Gallery

Summary

Simon Willison experiments with 21 quantized variants of IBM's Granite 4.1 3B LLM, prompting each to generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle. All results are poor with no correlation to model size.

Granite 4.1 3B SVG Pelican Gallery
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Granite 4.1 3B SVG Pelican Gallery

Simon Willison’s Weblog

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4th May 2026 - Link Blog

Granite 4.1 3B SVG Pelican Gallery. IBM released their Granite 4.1 family of LLMs a few days ago. They're Apache 2.0 licensed and come in 3B, 8B and 30B sizes.

Granite 4.1 LLMs: How They’re Built by Granite team member Yousaf Shah describes the training process in detail.

Unsloth released the unsloth/granite-4.1-3b-GGUF collection of GGUF encoded quantized variants of the 3B model - 21 different model files ranging in size from 1.2GB to 6.34GB.

All 21 of those Unsloth files add up to 51.3GB, which inspired me to finally try an experiment I've been wanting to run for ages: prompting "Generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle" against different sized quantized variants of the same model to see what the results would look like.

Honestly, the results are less interesting than I expected. There's no distinguishable pattern relating quality to size - they're all pretty terrible!

I'll likely try this again in the future with a model that's better at drawing pelicans.

Posted 4th May 2026 at 11:49 pm

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This is a link post by Simon Willison, posted on 4th May 2026.

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Key points and analysis

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Key points

  • IBM released Granite 4.1 LLMs (3B, 8B, 30B) under Apache 2.0 license.
  • Unsloth provided 21 GGUF quantized versions of the 3B model.
  • Willison tested all 21 with the same SVG prompt.
  • Outputs were uniformly bad, with no quality-size pattern.

Highlights and analysis are generated automatically and may contain errors. Check the original source.