Model reference · open weights

OpenELM-1

LLMs apple Text gen 1 build Its own licence terms 1.4M dl/mo

OpenELM-1 is an open-weight language model from apple. OpenELM-1_1B-Instruct (BF16) weighs 2.2 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.

  • OpenELM-1 is a 1.1B parameter text-generation model developed by Apple.
  • It is part of the OpenELM family, which uses a layer-wise scaling strategy to allocate parameters efficiently within transformer layers.
  • The model is released under the apple-amlr license.

Summary of the apple/OpenELM-1_1B-Instruct model card, 2026-10-01

What it is

Released byapple
Released2024-04-12
Parameters1.1B
VRAM2.2 GB for the weights

What it runs on

Memory and cards for OpenELM-1_1B-Instruct (BF16)

2.2 GBweights, file size
664 MBruntime overhead, at least

How much memory each request adds isn't estimated yet for this architecture. The weights need at least the cards below, plus room for the context.

CardWeights alone
RTX 3060 12 GBfits
RTX 4060 Ti 16 GBfits
RTX 3090 24 GBfits
RTX 4090 24 GBfits
RTX 5090 32 GBfits
L40S 48 GBfits
A100 80 GBfits
H100 80 GBfits
RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell 96 GBfits
DGX Spark (GB10) 128 GB unifiedfits
H200 141 GBfits
B200 180 GBfits

From the model card

What apple says about OpenELM-1

Read the model card

Sachin Mehta, Mohammad Hossein Sekhavat, Qingqing Cao, Maxwell Horton, Yanzi Jin, Chenfan Sun, Iman Mirzadeh, Mahyar Najibi, Dmitry Belenko, Peter Zatloukal, Mohammad Rastegari

We introduce OpenELM, a family of Open Efficient Language Models. OpenELM uses a layer-wise scaling strategy to efficiently allocate parameters within each layer of the transformer model, leading to enhanced accuracy. We pretrained OpenELM models using the CoreNet library. We release both pretrained and instruction tuned models with 270M, 450M, 1.1B and 3B parameters. We release the complete framework, encompassing data preparation, training, fine-tuning, and evaluation procedures, alongside multiple pre-trained checkpoints and training logs, to facilitate open research.

Our pre-training dataset contains RefinedWeb, deduplicated PILE, a subset of RedPajama, and a subset of Dolma v1.6, totaling approximately 1.8 trillion tokens. Please check license agreements and terms of these datasets before using them.

Usage

We have provided an example function to generate output from OpenELM models loaded via HuggingFace Hub in generate_openelm.py.

You can try the model by running the following command:

python generate_openelm.py --model apple/OpenELM-1_1B-Instruct --hf_access_token [HF_ACCESS_TOKEN] --prompt 'Once upon a time there was' --generate_kwargs repetition_penalty=1.2

Please refer to this link to obtain your hugging face access token.

Additional arguments to the hugging face generate function can be passed via generate_kwargs. As an example, to speedup the inference, you can try lookup token speculative generation by passing the prompt_lookup_num_tokens argument as follows:

python generate_openelm.py --model apple/OpenELM-1_1B-Instruct --hf_access_token [HF_ACCESS_TOKEN] --prompt 'Once upon a time there was' --generate_kwargs repetition_penalty=1.2 prompt_lookup_num_tokens=10

Alternatively, try model-wise speculative generation with an assistive model by passing a smaller model through the assistant_model argument, for example:

python generate_openelm.py --model apple/OpenELM-1_1B-Instruct --hf_access_token [HF_ACCESS_TOKEN] --prompt 'Once upon a time there was' --generate_kwargs repetition_penalty=1.2 --assistant_model [SMALLER_MODEL]

Main Results

Zero-Shot

Model SizeARC-cARC-eBoolQHellaSwagPIQASciQWinoGrandeAverage
OpenELM-270M26.4545.0853.9846.7169.7584.7053.9154.37
OpenELM-270M-Instruct30.5546.6848.5652.0770.7884.4052.7255.11
OpenELM-450M27.5648.0655.7853.9772.3187.2058.0157.56
OpenELM-450M-Instruct30.3850.0060.3759.3472.6388.0058.9659.95
OpenELM-1_1B32.3455.4363.5864.8175.5790.6061.7263.44
OpenELM-1_1B-Instruct37.9752.2370.0071.2075.0389.3062.7565.50
OpenELM-3B35.5859.8967.4072.4478.2492.7065.5167.39
OpenELM-3B-Instruct39.4261.7468.1776.3679.0092.5066.8569.15

LLM360

Model SizeARC-cHellaSwagMMLUTruthfulQAWinoGrandeAverage
OpenELM-270M27.6547.1525.7239.2453.8338.72
OpenELM-270M-Instruct32.5151.5826.7038.7253.2040.54
OpenELM-450M30.2053.8626.0140.1857.2241.50
OpenELM-450M-Instruct33.5359.3125.4140.4858.3343.41
OpenELM-1_1B36.6965.7127.0536.9863.2245.93
OpenELM-1_1B-Instruct41.5571.8325.6545.9564.7249.94
OpenELM-3B42.2473.2826.7634.9867.2548.90
[OpenELM-3B-Instruct]

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

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