Ministral 3 8B Instruct 2512 GGUF

A balanced model in the Ministral 3 family, Ministral 3 8B is a powerful, efficient tiny language model with vision capabilities.

This model includes different quantization levels of the instruct post-trained version in GGUF, fine-tuned for instruction tasks, making it ideal for chat and instruction based use cases.

The Ministral 3 family is designed for edge deployment, capable of running on a wide range of hardware. Ministral 3 8B can even be deployed locally, capable of fitting in 12GB of VRAM in FP8, and less if further quantized.

Learn more in our blog post and paper.

Key Features

Ministral 3 8B consists of two main architectural components:

• 8.4B Language Model
• 0.4B Vision Encoder

The Ministral 3 8B Instruct model offers the following capabilities:

• Vision: Enables the model to analyze images and provide insights based on visual content, in addition to text.
• Multilingual: Supports dozens of languages, including English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic.
• System Prompt: Maintains strong adherence and support for system prompts.
• Agentic: Offers best-in-class agentic capabilities with native function calling and JSON outputting.
• Edge-Optimized: Delivers best-in-class performance at a small scale, deployable anywhere.
• Apache 2.0 License: Open-source license allowing usage and modification for both commercial and non-commercial purposes.
• Large Context Window: Supports a 256k context window.

Recommended Settings

We recommend deploying with the following best practices:

• System Prompt: Define a clear environment and use case, including guidance on how to effectively leverage tools in agentic systems.
• Sampling Parameters: Use a temperature below 0.1 for daily-driver and production environments ; Higher temperatures may be explored for creative use cases - developers are encouraged to experiment with alternative settings.
• Tools: Keep the set of tools well-defined and limit their number to the minimum required for the use case - Avoiding overloading the model with an excessive number of tools.
• Vision: When deploying with vision capabilities, we recommend maintaining an aspect ratio close to 1:1 (width-to-height) for images. Avoiding the use of overly thin or wide images - crop them as needed to ensure optimal performance.

License

This model is licensed under the Apache 2.0 License.

You must not use this model in a manner that infringes, misappropriates, or otherwise violates any third party’s rights, including intellectual property rights.