TinyLlama 1.1B Chat v1.0
TinyLlama-1.1B-Chat-v1.0 is a 1.1B Llama-2-architecture model pretrained on 3 trillion tokens and chat-tuned on UltraChat and UltraFeedback. It was one of the earliest production-grade SLMs and remains a popular base model and benchmarking baseline.
Historically important, currently obsolete for new builds. For a new product in 2026 there is no scenario where we would pick TinyLlama over Qwen3-0.6B or SmolLM2-360M.
Overview
TinyLlama-1.1B-Chat-v1.0 is a 1.1B Llama-2-architecture model pretrained on 3 trillion tokens and chat-tuned on UltraChat and UltraFeedback. It was one of the earliest production-grade SLMs and remains a popular base model and benchmarking baseline.
Strengths
- Apache-2.0 with no acceptable-use restrictions
- Massive community: 2.2M downloads and hundreds of derivative fine-tunes
- Llama-2 architecture means it works in every legacy runtime
- Stable, well-understood baseline for SLM research papers
Weaknesses
- 2048-token context is a hard limit and feels archaic in 2026
- Quality is far below Qwen3-1.7B and Llama-3.2-1B
- Tokenizer (32K Llama-2 BPE) is inefficient for non-English text
- No tool-calling, no reasoning mode, no recent updates
Quantization variants
Each quantization trades model quality for file size and VRAM. Q4_K_M is the most popular starting point.
| Quantization | File size | VRAM required |
|---|---|---|
| Q4_K_M | 0.6 GB | 1 GB |
Get the model
HuggingFace
Original weights
Source repository — direct quantization required.
Hardware that runs this
Cards with enough VRAM for at least one quantization of TinyLlama 1.1B Chat v1.0.
Models worth comparing
Same parameter band, plus what's one tier above and below — so you can decide what actually fits your hardware.
Frequently asked
What's the minimum VRAM to run TinyLlama 1.1B Chat v1.0?
Can I use TinyLlama 1.1B Chat v1.0 commercially?
What's the context length of TinyLlama 1.1B Chat v1.0?
Source: huggingface.co/TinyLlama/TinyLlama-1.1B-Chat-v1.0
Reviewed by RunLocalAI Editorial. See our editorial policy for how we research and verify model claims.
Related — keep moving
Verify TinyLlama 1.1B Chat v1.0 runs on your specific hardware before committing money.