OSAIM
Open Source AI Models

Llama 3.2 3B

Pocket-sized Llama 3 variant for edge deployment. Surprising chat quality after instruction tuning makes it competitive with much larger models from a previous generation. At Q4 it fits in ~2 GB of VRAM and runs on consumer GPUs and recent Apple Silicon.

A strong default for on-device chat, summarisation, and structured extraction tasks where the workload doesn't need frontier reasoning quality.

Parameters
3B
Context length
128K
Modality
text
Released
2024-09-25

Memory & hardware

VRAM (fp16)
6 GB
VRAM (Q4)
1.8 GB
Recommended
RTX 3060 12GB / iPhone 15 Pro+
Quantizations
fp16, q8_0, q4_k_m, gguf

License: Llama 3 Community License

SPDX
Commercial use
Yes
Modification
Yes
Redistribution
Yes

Benchmarks

MMLU
63.4
HumanEval
51.5
MATH
48.0
Benchmarks last verified 2026-05-18.

Hosted inference pricing

USD per million tokens.

ProviderInputOutput
groqCheapest$0.06$0.06
Pricing last verified 2026-05-18. Providers update rates frequently; confirm before integrating.

Run it yourself

Drop-in commands for the three most common open-source inference paths. The Ollama tag is a best-effort match against the registry; verify the size variant before pulling.

Run Llama 3.2 3B locally
Ollama (easiest)
ollama run llama3.2:3b
Single-line install + run; uses the official Ollama registry tag for this family.
vLLM (production)
vllm serve meta-llama/Llama-3.2-3B
High-throughput hosted inference; one command to expose an OpenAI-compatible HTTP server.
Transformers (Python)
from transformers import AutoTokenizer, AutoModelForCausalLM

tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("meta-llama/Llama-3.2-3B")
model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained(
    "meta-llama/Llama-3.2-3B", device_map="auto", torch_dtype="auto"
)
Direct PyTorch usage. Pin a torch / cuda version that matches your GPU.
Hugging Face ID: meta-llama/Llama-3.2-3B

Related models

Same family or similar size — useful when shopping around.

Llama 3.1 8B Instruct
8B

The workhorse 8B instruction-tuned model. Excellent quality-to-cost ratio and the broadest ecosystem support of any open-weights model — every major inference engine, fine-tuning library, and quantization toolchain has a 3.1 8B preset. Fits in 24 GB of VRAM at fp16, ~6 GB at Q4. Strong default for production chat where 70B is overkill, for fine-tuning on a specialist task, and for any workload where you want a known-good baseline.

Context
128K
License
llama-3
VRAM Q4
4.8 GB
Llama 3.2 11B Vision
11B

Llama 3's first vision-language model. Image understanding via a separately-trained ViT adapter bolted onto Llama 3 weights. Useful for OCR-adjacent workloads, document understanding, and image captioning at a permissive licence. The 11B size makes it cheap to host. Combined with the 128K text context, it handles long PDF-with-images workflows comfortably on a single 4090.

Context
128K
License
llama-3
VRAM Q4
6.6 GB
Phi-3 Mini 4K Instruct
3.8B

Microsoft's flagship small-model demonstration: GPT-3.5-class on academic benchmarks at <4B parameters. The 4K context-window variant is the lightest; a 128K variant ships separately. MIT licensed, well-suited to on-device assistants and structured-extraction workloads where compactness matters more than absolute quality.

Context
4K
License
mit
VRAM Q4
2.3 GB
Llama 3.2 1B
1B

The smallest Llama 3 release, designed for on-device inference on phones and laptops. The 1B model runs comfortably in <2 GB of RAM at Q4 quantization and is fast enough for real-time chat on a modern smartphone. Useful for edge inference, on-device assistants where round-tripping to a server is undesirable, and as a draft model for speculative decoding in front of a larger Llama 3 variant.

Context
128K
License
llama-3
VRAM Q4
0.6 GB
Mistral 7B v0.3
7B

The original Mistral 7B refresh with 32K context and extended vocabulary. Permissive Apache 2.0 weights and the first widely-deployed sliding-window-attention model. Still useful in 2026 for very-low-cost inference and as a baseline for fine-tuning experiments.

Context
33K
License
apache-2-0
VRAM Q4
4.2 GB
Qwen2.5 7B Instruct
7B

Apache-2.0-licensed 7B model with surprisingly strong reasoning and multilingual chops. Qwen 2.5 trains on a larger and more carefully filtered corpus than the original Qwen series, and the 7B variant punches well above its weight on coding and math benchmarks. A strong default for cost-sensitive chat workloads and for fine-tuning experiments where the Apache licence simplifies downstream redistribution.

Context
128K
License
apache-2-0
VRAM Q4
4.2 GB