Model reference · open weights
AI21-Jamba2 is an open-weight language model from ai21labs. AI21-Jamba2-3B (BF16) weighs 6.4 GB; the smallest configuration that runs it is RTX 3060 12 GB.
For self-hosting, compare this build's requirements below with the GPU you plan to rent.
Summary of the ai21labs/AI21-Jamba2-3B model card, 2026-10-01
What it is
| Released by | ai21labs |
|---|---|
| Released | 2026-01-06 |
| Parameters | 3.0B |
| VRAM | 6.4 GB for the weights |
What it runs on
| Card | Requests at once | Context max | Memory | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 8K each | 32K each | |||
| RTX 3060 12 GB | 249 | 105 | all 256K | 11.6 GB |
| RTX 4060 Ti 16 GB | 454 | 192 | all 256K | 15.4 GB |
| RTX 3090 24 GB | 886 | 375 | all 256K | 23.4 GB |
| RTX 4090 24 GB | 883 | 374 | all 256K | 23.4 GB |
| RTX 5090 32 GB | 1000+ | 549 | all 256K | 31.0 GB |
| L40S 48 GB | 1000+ | 846 | all 256K | 44.0 GB |
| A100 80 GB | 1000+ | 1000+ | all 256K | 78.2 GB |
| H100 80 GB | 1000+ | 1000+ | all 256K | 78.1 GB |
| RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell 96 GB | 1000+ | 1000+ | all 256K | 93.8 GB |
| DGX Spark (GB10) 128 GB unified | 1000+ | 1000+ | all 256K | 107 GB |
| H200 141 GB | 1000+ | 1000+ | all 256K | 138 GB |
| B200 180 GB | 1000+ | 1000+ | all 256K | 176 GB |
| Requests at once | 8K tokens each | 32K tokens each |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 7.0 GB | 7.0 GB |
| 5 | 7.1 GB | 7.2 GB |
| 8 | 7.1 GB | 7.3 GB |
| 16 | 7.3 GB | 7.7 GB |
| 32 | 7.6 GB | 8.4 GB |
| 64 | 8.2 GB | 9.8 GB |
One card, with vLLM's small-card settings.
From the model card
Jamba2 3B is an ultra-compact open source model designed to bring enterprise-grade reliability to on-device deployments. At just 3B parameters, it runs efficiently on consumer devices—iPhones, Androids, Macs, and PCs—while maintaining the grounding and instruction-following capabilities required for production use.
Released under Apache 2.0 License with a 256K context window, Jamba2 3B enables developers to build reliable AI applications for edge environments. For more details, read the full release blog post.
Jamba2 3B achieves category-leading performance on instruction following and grounding benchmarks despite its compact size. The model delivers consistent, context-faithful outputs across diverse enterprise tasks including RAG workflows and technical document processing.
Jamba2 models were developed using a comprehensive post-training pipeline starting from Jamba 1.5 pre-training. The models underwent mid-training on 500B carefully curated tokens with increased representation of math, code, high-quality web data, and long documents. A state passing phase optimized the Mamba layers for effective context length generalization. Training continued with cold start supervised fine-tuning to establish instruction-following and reasoning capabilities, followed by DPO optimization.
The final training stages involved multiple on-policy reinforcement learning phases, progressively moving from short-context verifiable rewards to longer context training with mixed verifiable and model-based rewards. Evaluation focused on two key enterprise reliability signals: instruction-following benchmarks measuring steerability, and grounding benchmarks testing context faithfulness. Human evaluators assessed performance on real-world enterprise tasks using blind, counterbalanced side-by-side comparisons, rating outputs on factuality, style, constraint-adherence, instruction-following, and helpfulness.
Best results require vLLM version 0.10.2 or higher.
vllm serve "ai21labs/AI21-Jamba2-3B" --mamba-ssm-cache-dtype float32 --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser hermes --enable-prefix-caching
pip install transformers>= 4.54.0
pip install flash-attn --no-build-isolation
pip install causal-conv1d>=1.2.0
pip install mamba-ssm
import torch
from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM, AutoTokenizer
model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained("ai21labs/AI21-Jamba2-3B",
dtype=torch.bfloat16,
attn_implementation="flash_attention_2",
device_map="auto")
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("ai21labs/AI21-Jamba-3B")
messages = [
{"role": "system",
"content": "You are an HR Policy Assistant.
Answer employee questions using only the provided policy documents.
If the answer isn't in the documents, say so clearly.
Be concise and cite the specific policy section when possible."
},
{"role": "user",
"content": "Context documents: {retrieved_chunks}.
Employee question: {user_question}.
Answer:"
},
]
prompts = tokenizer.apply_chat_template(messages, add_generation_prompt=True, tokenize=False)
outputs = model.generate(**tokenizer(prompts, return_tensors="pt").to(model.device), do_sample=True, temperature=0.6)
generated_text = tokenizer.decode(outputs[0], skip_special_tokens=True)
print(generated_text)
Quoted from the model card on Hugging Face. The full card is behind the Hugging Face link above.