Release notes for Red Hat AI Inference

Use the release notes to learn about the latest changes to the documentation that are grouped by month.

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May 2026

Inferencing is now generally available: You can now use Red Hat AI Inference to run inferencing workloads in production. Use industry-standard OpenAI and OGX compatible APIs for chat completions to integrate inferencing capabilities into your applications. A playground is now available in the console where you can test different inferencing settings and configurations before moving to production. For more information, see Getting started.

Inferencing with Red Hat AI on IBM Cloud (Beta): You can now use inferencing to interact with foundation models and evaluate AI-powered responses for your applications. The inferencing feature provides industry-standard OpenAI and OGX compatible APIs for chat completions and model management. This beta feature is available for evaluation and testing purposes. To get access to the beta, send an email to instructlab@ibm.com. For more information, see Inferencing with Red Hat AI on IBM Cloud.

Red Hat AI Inference CLI plug-in version 0.0.26: Version 0.0.26 of the plug-in adds file size limits. Each of the skills and knowledge documents must be less than 100 GB in size. The cumulative size of all the skills and knowledge JSON files must be less than 400 GB.

Version 1.5 of Red Hat AI Inference is available: For the best results, run training on newly generated synthetic data with version 1.5. Review the updated service settings in 1.5.; For more information, see the release notes, the RHEL AI documentation and the known issues
New base model: Red Hat AI Inference now uses the granite-3.1-8b-starter-v2.1 model. For more information, see the model specifications.

New! Import your own training data: You can now import your own training data for training models. When you import your own training data, you can specify previously generated data IDs, or add knowledge and skills files to a data generation job by uploading files from Object Storage or your local machine. For more information, see Generating data.
New! Taxonomy validation: When you upload a taxonomy to Red Hat AI Inference, it's now checked for formatting and syntax errors. Also, if you reference external knowledge documents in your qna.yaml files, Red Hat AI Inference checks for access to those files. Additionally, Red Hat AI Inference checks for the proper service authorizations for services like Object Storage and Secrets Manager.
Red Hat AI Inference CLI plug-in version 0.0.24: Version 0.0.24 of the plug-in adds support for importing your own training data to the data generate command. For more information, see Generating data or run ibmcloud ilab data generate --help to see the new options.

New! Private repo support: You can now use Secrets Manager to give Red Hat AI Inference access to your taxonomy knowledge documents in private repositories or GitHub Enterprise repositories. You can enable private repository access when uploading your taxonomy in the console or by using the CLI. For information, see Getting started with Red Hat AI Inference.

Introducing Red Hat AI Inference on IBM Cloud!: Get ready to dive into AI! InstructLab is an open source project from IBM and Red Hat to be a cost-effective entry point into the world of machine learning.