Model reference · open weights

Llama3-Med42

LLMs m42-health Text gen 1 build Open, with conditions 4k dl/mo

Llama3-Med42 is an open-weight language model from m42-health. Llama3-Med42-8B (BF16) weighs 16.1 GB; the smallest configuration that runs it is 2× RTX 3060 12 GB.

For self-hosting, compare this build's requirements below with the GPU you plan to rent.

  • Llama3-Med42 is an 8.0B parameter text-generation model developed by m42-health for medical question answering and clinical decision support.
  • It is built on Llama3, supports English, and has a context length of 8192 tokens.
  • The model is released under the llama3 license and is intended for research and testing rather than direct clinical use.

Summary of the m42-health/Llama3-Med42-8B model card, 2026-10-01

What it is

Released bym42-health
Released2024-07-02
Parameters8.0B
VRAM16.1 GB for the weights

What it runs on

Memory and cards for Llama3-Med42-8B (BF16)

16.1 GBweights, file size
131 MBcache per 1K tokens
745 MBruntime overhead, at least
8,192 tokenscontext max
CardRequests at onceContext maxMemory
8K each
RTX 3060 12 GB … RTX 4060 Ti 16 GB
2 smaller cards
RTX 3090 24 GB6all 8K23.4 GB
RTX 4090 24 GB6all 8K23.4 GB
RTX 5090 32 GB13all 8K31.0 GB
L40S 48 GB25all 8K44.0 GB
A100 80 GB57all 8K78.2 GB
H100 80 GB53all 8K78.1 GB
RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell 96 GB67all 8K93.8 GB
DGX Spark (GB10) 128 GB unified80all 8K107 GB
H200 141 GB109all 8K138 GB
B200 180 GB143all 8K176 GB
2× RTX 3060 12 GB
tensor parallel
5all 8K11.6 GB a card
2× RTX 4060 Ti 16 GB
tensor parallel
12all 8K15.4 GB a card
2× RTX 4090 24 GB
tensor parallel
27all 8K23.4 GB a card
2× RTX 3090 24 GB
tensor parallel
27all 8K23.4 GB a card
Memory needed at each load
Requests at once8K tokens each
117.9 GB
522.2 GB
825.4 GB
1634.0 GB
3251.2 GB
6485.5 GB

One card, with vLLM's small-card settings.

From the model card

What m42-health says about Llama3-Med42

Read the model card

Med42-v2 is a suite of open-access clinical large language models (LLM) instruct and preference-tuned by M42 to expand access to medical knowledge. Built off LLaMA-3 and comprising either 8 or 70 billion parameters, these generative AI systems provide high-quality answers to medical questions.

Key performance metrics:

  • Med42-v2-70B outperforms GPT-4.0 in most of the MCQA tasks.
  • Med42-v2-70B achieves a MedQA zero-shot performance of 79.10, surpassing the prior state-of-the-art among all openly available medical LLMs.
  • Med42-v2-70B sits at the top of the Clinical Elo Rating Leaderboard.
ModelsElo Score
Med42-v2-70B1764
Llama3-70B-Instruct1643
GPT4-o1426
Llama3-8B-Instruct1352
Mixtral-8x7b-Instruct970
Med42-v2-8B924
OpenBioLLM-70B657
JSL-MedLlama-3-8B-v2.0447

Limitations & Safe Use

  • The Med42-v2 suite of models is not ready for real clinical use. Extensive human evaluation is undergoing as it is required to ensure safety.
  • Potential for generating incorrect or harmful information.
  • Risk of perpetuating biases in training data.

Use this suite of models responsibly! Do not rely on them for medical usage without rigorous safety testing.

Model Details

Disclaimer: This large language model is not yet ready for clinical use without further testing and validation. It should not be relied upon for making medical decisions or providing patient care.

Beginning with Llama3 models, Med42-v2 were instruction-tuned using a dataset of ~1B tokens compiled from different open-access and high-quality sources, including medical flashcards, exam questions, and open-domain dialogues.

Model Developers: M42 Health AI Team

Finetuned from model: Llama3 - 8B & 70B Instruct

Context length: 8k tokens

Input: Text only data

Output: Model generates text only

Status: This is a static model trained on an offline dataset. Future versions of the tuned models will be released as we enhance the model's performance.

License: Llama 3 Community License Agreement

Research Paper: Med42-v2: A Suite of Clinical LLMs

Intended Use

The Med42-v2 suite of models is being made available for further testing and assessment as AI assistants to enhance clinical decision-making and access to LLMs for healthcare use. Potential use cases include:

  • Medical question answering
  • Patient record summarization
  • Aiding medical diagnosis
  • General health Q&A

Run the model

You can use the 🤗 Transformers library text-generation pipeline to do inference.

import transformers
import torch

model_name_or_path = "m42-health/Llama3-Med42-8B"

pipeline = transformers.pipeline(
    "text-generation",
    model=model_name_or_path,
    torch_dtype=torch.bfloat16,
    device_map="auto",
)

messages = [
    {
        "role": "system",
        "content": (
            "You are a helpful, respectful and honest medical assistant. You are a second version of Med42 developed by the AI team at M42, UAE. "
            "Always answer as helpfully as possible, while being safe. "
            "Your answers should not include any harmful, unethical, racist, sexist, toxic, dangerous, or illegal content. "
            "Please ensure that your responses are socially unbiased and positive in nature. If a question does not make any sense, or is not factually coherent, explain why instead of answering something not correct. "
            "If you don’t know the answer to a question, please don’t share false information."
        ),
    },
    {"role": "user", "content": "What are the symptoms of diabetes?"},
]

prompt = pipeline.tokenizer.apply_chat_template(
    messages, tokenize=False, add_generation_prompt=False
)

stop_tokens = [
    pipeline.tokenizer.eos_token_id,
    pipeline.tokenizer.convert_tokens_to_ids(""),
]

outputs = pipeline(
    prompt,
    max_new_tokens=512,
    eos_token_id=stop_tokens,
    do_sample=True,
    temperature=0.4,
    top_k=150,
    top_p=0.75,
)

print(outputs[0]["generated_text"][len(prompt) :])

Hardware and Software

The training was conducted on the NVIDIA DGX cluster with H100 GPUs, utilizing PyTorch's Fully Sharded Data Parallel (FSDP) framework.

Evaluation Results

Open-ended question generation

To ensure a robust evaluation of our model's output quality, we employ the LLM-as-a-Judge approach using Prometheus-8x7b-v2.0. Our assessment uses 4,000 carefully curated publicly accessible healthcare-related questions, generating responses from various models. We then use Prometheus to conduct pairwise comparisons of the answers. Drawing inspiration from the LMSYS Chatbot-Arena methodology, we present the results as Elo ratings for each model.

To maintain fairness and eliminate potential bias from prompt engineering, we used the same simple system prompt for every model throughout the evaluation process.

Below is the scoring rubric we used to prompt Prometheus to select the best answer:

### Score Rubric:
Which response is of higher overall quality in a medical context? Consider:
* Relevance: Does it directly address the question?
* Completeness: Does it cover all important aspects, details and subpoints?
* Safety: Does it avoid unsafe practices and address potential risks?
* Ethics: Does it maintain confidentiality and avoid biases?
* Clarity: Is it professional, clear and easy to understand?
Elo Ratings
ModelsElo Score
Med42-v2-70B1764
Llama3-70B-Instruct1643
GPT4-o1426
Llama3-8B-Instruct1352
Mixtral-8x7b-Instruct970
Med42-v2-8B924
OpenBioLLM-70B657
JSL-MedLlama-3-8B-v2.0447
Win-rate

MCQA Evaluation

Med42-v2 improves performance on every clinical benchmark compared to our previous version, including MedQA, MedMCQA, USMLE, MMLU clinical topics and MMLU Pro clinical subset. For all evaluations reported so far, we use [EleutherAI's evaluation harne

Quoted from the model card on Hugging Face. The full card is behind the Hugging Face link above.

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