What GPU do I need to run allenai/wildguard?
7.2B parameters, published in BF16. View on Hugging FaceGated
Set up wildguardwildguard is published by allenai on Hugging Face, with 138,480 downloads and 57 likes to date. It's a MistralForCausalLM model built for text-generation, published natively in BF16, and gated: you'll need to accept the model's terms on Hugging Face before downloading weights.
VRAM required & cheapest live GPU fit
Required VRAM = weight size at each precision times a flat 1.2 overhead for activations and fragmentation. The KV-cache grows with context and is not in that factor; it is listed per model below where the architecture is published. Full formula and assumptions: methodology.
| Precision | Weight size | Required VRAM | Cheapest live fit | GPUs needed | Est. $/hr (full fit) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| BF16 | 13.5 GB | 16.2 GB | RTX A5000 | 1 | $0.176/hr |
| FP8 (quantized) | 6.8 GB | 8.1 GB | RTX 4070 Super | 1 | $0.121/hr |
| INT4 (quantized) | 3.4 GB | 4.1 GB | RTX 3060 | 1 | $0.110/hr |
A GPU is only matched to a row if its hardware supports that precision, and the primary recommendation is always a single-GPU fit when one exists.
INT4 requires a quantized checkpoint actually published for this model, check its Hugging Face page before relying on this row.
Cheapest way to run wildguard at its published (BF16) precision: 1× RTX A5000, at $0.176/hr per GPU ($0.176/hr total). Quantizing to FP8 or INT4 (rows above) can cost less, but requires a compatible quantized checkpoint to exist for this model.
wildguard: KV cache by context length
The KV cache is the memory the attention layers hold for every token of context, on top of the weights. It is not part of the flat 1.2x overhead in the table above, grows with context length and with every concurrent request, and is why a long-context deployment needs more VRAM than the table shows.
KV-cache size for wildguard is not published for this architecture, so no figure is shown.
wildguard: common questions
Does wildguard fit on a 24 GB GPU?
Yes. At BF16 it needs 16.2 GB of VRAM, so a 24 GB card holds it with 7.8 GB to spare. A 16 GB card is not enough for it at BF16.
Do I need approval to download wildguard?
Yes. allenai gates this repository on Hugging Face, so you have to accept its terms with a signed-in account before the weights will download. It does not change the 16.2 GB the model needs once you have them.
What is the least VRAM wildguard can run in?
4.1 GB, at INT4 (quantized), which fits a 6 GB card, against 16.2 GB at BF16. That row assumes an INT4 checkpoint has actually been published for this model, so check its Hugging Face page before planning around it.
Does quantizing wildguard lower the GPU bill?
Yes. At BF16 the cheapest live fit is one RTX A5000 at $0.176/hr. At INT4 (quantized) it drops to one RTX 3060 at $0.110/hr, provided a quantized checkpoint exists for it.
Weight-to-VRAM math, the fit rules, and how live prices are normalized: full methodology.
More allenai models
- Olmo-Hybrid-7B (7.4B, BF16)
Alternatives at this size
Other models for text-generation within about a third of wildguard's 7.2B parameters, from other model lines.
- Qwen3-8B (8.2B, BF16)
- Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct (8.0B, BF16)
- Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.2 (7.2B, BF16)
- granite-4.1-8b (8.8B, BF16)
- DeepSeek-R1-0528-Qwen3-8B (8.2B, BF16)
More on wildguard
Fits on a 24 GB GPU at BF16: every model that fits in 24 GB.
Fits on a 12 GB GPU at FP8: every model that fits in 12 GB.
Fits on an 8 GB GPU at INT4: every model that fits in 8 GB.
Best chat and assistants models: how wildguard ranks against the rest.
Related reading: RTX A5000 pricing and specs, How much VRAM you need for LLMs, Serving LLMs with vLLM, vLLM vs TensorRT-LLM vs SGLang, and Best GPU for LLM inference.
