Release notes for InstructLab

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

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April 2026

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 Llama Stack 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.

InstructLab 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 InstructLab 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 InstructLab 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 InstructLab, it's now checked for formatting and syntax errors. Also, if you reference external knowledge documents in your qna.yaml files, InstructLab checks for access to those files. Additionally, InstructLab checks for the proper service authorizations for services like Object Storage and Secrets Manager.
InstructLab 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 InstructLab 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 InstructLab.

Introducing Red Hat AI InstructLab 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.