Jamba (AI21 Labs)

https://www.ai21.com/jamba/

Israeli production model. Interleaves Mamba SSM layers with Transformer attention (1:7 ratio) + MoE blocks every 2 layers. SSM layers maintain fixed-size recurrent hidden state — compressed long-context memory bypassing growing KV cache.

Active · Verified 2026-10-22 · fresh as of 2026-10-22 · 41 cited facts, 3 with a third-party source · 1 recorded change · Suggest a correction

At a glance

Tier
T1
Created
2020-11 third-party fix
Freshness
2026-10-22 fix
Layer
large-models repo fix
Licensing
open-core (estimate) fix
Deployment locus
hybrid vendor fix
Platform vs product
platform vendor fix
SDK languages
python, rest, typescript vendor fix

When to use

Optimised for: long context (256K) at lower cost via SSM-Transformer hybrid

Anti-fit: not for ultra-low-cost commodity inference (premium positioning)

Pros & cons

Pros

Hybrid Transformer/Mamba architecture means memory cost grows sub-quadratically — long-context inference is genuinely cheaper.

Cons

Smaller ecosystem than Llama / Mistral; less third-party tooling support.

Claims & capabilities

256K context on single 8-GPU node. 3× throughput vs Mixtral 8x7B on long contexts. Jamba Reasoning 3B runs 250K-context inference on a laptop.

Technical surface

API surface
searched not found
Backend storage
searched not found
Deployment
Both (AI21 Studio cloud; Azure/AWS Bedrock/GCP Vertex AI; private VPC; on-premises)
Embedding model
searched not found
Multi-tenancy
searched not found
MCP
not documented publicly
A2A
not documented publicly
OpenTelemetry
not documented publicly

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Sources (40 cited facts, 3 third-party)

Each fact links to the page it came from; the badge says who published it (how to read sources).

What changed

Changes to this record's lifecycle, licence, release, pricing and hosting facts, from the catalog's git history. Subscribe (Atom)

  1. 2026-10-22
    • License “not applicable — not OSS” → “Apache-2.0 (Jamba2); earlier Jamba 1.5–1.7 under Jamba Open Model License” source
    • Latest release “not applicable — not OSS” → “Jamba2 3B / Jamba2 Mini (52B, 12B active) (2026-01-08)” source
    #219

Related systems

Referenced by (6)

  • LangChain (framework) integrates with — LangChain docs have an AI21 integration provider page (AI21 Labs' Jurassic models for text generation). (verified 2026-10-29)
  • LiteLLM integrates with — LiteLLM docs have an AI21 provider page. (verified 2026-10-29)
  • LlamaIndex (framework) integrates with — LlamaIndex has an official LLM integration package llama-index-llms-ai21 in its repo. (verified 2026-10-29)
  • OpenRouter integrates with — OpenRouter lists AI21 as an inference provider (providers API slug "ai21"). (verified 2026-10-29)
  • Portkey AI integrates with — Portkey docs have an AI21 LLM provider integration page. (verified 2026-10-29)
  • TrueFoundry AI Gateway integrates with — TrueFoundry AI Gateway docs have a AI21 model-provider page. (verified 2026-10-29)