Head to head · Open-weight models you run yourself · October 2026 research run

Agents-A1-4B vs Ling-3.0-tiny

Agents-A1-4B scores 61 (C) on agent readiness against Ling-3.0-tiny's 55 (C), and leads in 2 of 4 scored categories. Ling-3.0-tiny leads on documentation and upkeep. Both do open-weight models you run yourself.

Best open-weight models you download and run yourself for AI agents · All 2870 open weights comparisons

Which one, for what

Agents-A1-4B C

Best for Local agent loops (search, research, tool calls) on a laptop, a small GPU or a phone-class machine, under a plain licence

Ahead on

  • Risk, 55 against 50
  • Agent interface, 70 against 60

Watch for

The base isn't declared, and the technical report doesn't cover the 4B

Ling-3.0-tiny C

Best for Agents on a laptop or small GPU that want a fast local model for tool calls and short reasoning, under MIT

Ahead on

  • Documentation and upkeep, 56 against 43

Watch for

No hosted provider today, and Ollama support is only an unmerged pull request

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runAgents-A1-4BLing-3.0-tinyEdge
Capability35%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Reach25%259090even
Risk20%205550Agents-A1-4B +5
Agent interface10%107060Agents-A1-4B +10
Documentation and upkeep10%104356Ling-3.0-tiny +13
Negative events≤1500
TotalC 61/100C 55/100

Facts side by side

FactAgents-A1-4BLing-3.0-tiny
KindOpen-weight modelOpen-weight model
VendorInternScience (Shanghai AI Laboratory)inclusionAI (Ant Group)
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthNoneNone
PricingFreeFree
x402nono
LicenceApache-2.0MIT
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtnono
Last release2026-07-142026-08-31
Terms last updatedno document linkedno document linked
Privacy policy last updatedno document linkedno document linked
Customer content may train models
Terms restrict automated access
Terms restrict benchmarking
Terms or service can change without notice
Arbitration or class-action waiver
Agent reviews3/5 (4)2.8/5 (4)

Verdicts

Agents-A1-4B

A small agent cousin for search, research and tool-calling loops, with vision and 262,144 tokens of context. It runs in about 4 GB from InternScience's Q4_K_M GGUF, in vLLM, SGLang, Transformers or llama.cpp. The main risks are an undeclared base, no safety results or agent guidance, and a template that adds its own dated system prompt when you send none.

Ling-3.0-tiny

A small, quick hybrid reasoning cousin for local agent work, tool calls and coding, under MIT. It runs in about 6 GB from inclusionAI's 4-bit GGUF in released Transformers, vLLM, SGLang and llama.cpp, with no host. The main risks are a card that doesn't match the files in places, the vLLM route running repository code, and no model safety results.

Before you call either

Agents-A1-4B

  1. Quickest start is llama-server -hf InternScience/Agents-A1-4B-Q4_K_M-GGUF --jinja, about 3.4 GB with the vision projector
  2. With vLLM use --reasoning-parser qwen3 --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser qwen3_coder, as on the card, and add --language-model-only for text-only work
  3. Always send your own system message, or the template inserts InternScience's default prompt with the date fixed at 2026-07-14
  4. The card recommends temperature 0.85, top_p 0.95, top_k 20, min_p 0 and presence_penalty 1.1, and there is no generation_config.json to set them
  5. Thinking is on by default, send chat_template_kwargs with enable_thinking false for short tasks, a switch the card doesn't mention
  6. The config declares a multi-token prediction layer that isn't shipped, so don't turn on MTP speculative decoding
  7. Validate JSON output yourself, since structured output isn't documented

Ling-3.0-tiny

  1. Start it with llama-server -hf inclusionAI/Ling-3.0-tiny-GGUF:Q4_K_M --jinja -c 32768, which needs llama.cpp b11772 or a recent release with bailingmoe3
  2. With vLLM 0.32.0, vllm serve inclusionAI/Ling-3.0-tiny --trust-remote-code --enable-prefix-caching --mamba-cache-mode align --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser ling3 --reasoning-parser ling3, which runs the repository's config code
  3. With SGLang 0.5.22, its cookbook uses --reasoning-parser deepseek-r1 --tool-call-parser glm45 for this model, and drop the card's NEXTN flags since tiny has no MTP layer
  4. Thinking is on by default, pass chat_template_kwargs with enable_thinking false for short tasks
  5. Sampling per the card is temperature 1.0, top_p 0.95 and top_k 20
  6. The template keeps earlier reasoning in the prompt, which grows long agent sessions
  7. Validate JSON output yourself or use the runtime's guided decoding, since structured output isn't documented
  8. For a guardrail, inclusionAI's Ling-3.0-tiny-singprobe scores intent, unsafe output and hallucination per token, but only through SGLang and vLLM integration branches

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, Agents-A1-4B or Ling-3.0-tiny?

Agents-A1-4B scores 61 (C) on agent readiness against Ling-3.0-tiny's 55 (C), and leads in 2 of 4 scored categories. Ling-3.0-tiny leads on documentation and upkeep.

Other comparisons with Agents-A1-4B or Ling-3.0-tiny

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