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

Agents-A1-4B vs Ripple-65B Preview

Agents-A1-4B scores 61 (C) on agent readiness against Ripple-65B Preview's 53.3 (D), and leads in 1 of 4 scored categories. Ripple-65B Preview leads on agent interface and documentation and upkeep. Both do open-weight models you run yourself.

Best open-weight models you download and run yourself for AI agents · All 3674 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

  • Reach, 90 against 45

Watch for

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

Ripple-65B Preview D

Best for Teams with Blackwell GPUs or a DGX Spark who want an Apache 2.0 coding model to try for terminal and agentic coding work, and can run the publisher's code to serve it.

Ahead on

  • Agent interface, 75 against 70
  • Documentation and upkeep, 49 against 43

Watch for

No released runtime runs the architecture, so running it means Ricursive's Python in SGLang 0.5.19 or Transformers' remote code

Why the edge

Each category where one leads by five points or more, with the reason behind each side's score from its assessment. The numbers are in the table below; this is what they stand for.

Reach Agents-A1-4B +45

Agents-A1-4B 90

Memory 30, InternScience's Q4_K_M GGUF with its vision projector is 3.4 GB and needs about 4.1 GB with the fifth added. Runtimes 20, the Qwen3.5 architecture runs in released vLLM, SGLang, Transformers and llama.cpp, while Ollama's and LM Studio's entries are the base's, not this model's. Builds 15, InternScience publishes FP8 and three GGUF precisions. Terms 15, Apache 2.0 with nothing added. Download 10, nothing is gated. Hosted 0, one inference provider serves it and the line needs two.

Ripple-65B Preview 45

Memory 10 of 30, the smallest 4-bit build is Ricursive's NVFP4 at 57.2 GB, 68.7 GB with a fifth added, which is over 64 GB and fits our reference machine. Runtimes 0, no released runtime runs the ricursive architecture with its own code; Ricursive's SGLang plugin and Transformers' remote code don't count. Builds 10, one quantised precision (NVFP4) from Ricursive. Terms 15, Apache 2.0 with nothing added. Download 10, not gated. Hosted 0, Ricursive serves no API, Hugging Face maps no provider, Together AI's page says coming soon, and GMI Cloud's and OpenRouter's pages weren't read.

Documentation and upkeep Ripple-65B Preview +6

Agents-A1-4B 43

Model card 8, it covers intended use, parameters and context but not the architecture, limitations, languages or a knowledge cut-off. Training data 5, a general description with no cut-off. Last change 10, the files went up on 14 July 2026, 112 days before 3 November 2026, and the GitHub repository's last commit is 16 July. Responsiveness 10, InternScience answered one of the three discussions, unchanged on 3 November 2026. Version policy 5, a first release. File health 5, the files agree on the essentials, but the config declares a prediction layer that isn't shipped and the template carries a dated default prompt.

Ripple-65B Preview 49

Model card 14 of 20, no limitations and no knowledge cut-off. Training data 5, a general description with token counts and no cut-off. Last change 20, released today. Responsiveness 0, no discussions yet, read as none answered. Version policy 5, a first release, with the NVFP4 checkpoint replaced in place on release day under a commit note. File health 5, tokenizer_config.json carries a second, tool-less chat template and a 131,072-token limit against the card's 1M.

Agent interface Ripple-65B Preview +5

Agents-A1-4B 70

Chat template 20, a Jinja file in the repository. Tool-calling format 10, the card names the qwen3_coder parser but the format is only in the template. Trained tool calling 20, the card says it was trained for tool use and the template renders several calls in one turn. Structured output 0. Reasoning control 10, the template turns thinking off per request and the card's reasoning parser returns it apart from the answer. Context 10, 262,144 tokens.

Ripple-65B Preview 75

Chat template 20, chat_template.jinja in the repository. Tool-calling format 25, Ricursive's server README says how tools are declared and calls come back, with the ripple parser in SGLang 0.5.19. Trained tool calling 20, one or more calls a turn and agentic-coding RL. Structured output 0, not documented. Reasoning control 0, the template has no thinking switch or effort levels. Context 10, long-context training at 2M-token sequences for a stated 1M.

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runAgents-A1-4BRipple-65B PreviewEdge
Capability35%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Reach25%259045Agents-A1-4B +45
Risk20%205555even
Agent interface10%107075Ripple-65B Preview +5
Documentation and upkeep10%104349Ripple-65B Preview +6
Negative events≤1500
TotalC 61/100D 53.3/100

Facts side by side

FactAgents-A1-4BRipple-65B Preview
KindOpen-weight modelOpen-weight model
VendorInternScience (Shanghai AI Laboratory)Ricursive Intelligence
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthNoneNone
PricingFreeFree
x402nono
LicenceApache-2.0Apache-2.0
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtnono
Last release2026-07-142026-11-04
Terms last updatedno document linkednot read yet
Privacy policy last updatedno document linkedno document linked
Agent reviews3/5 (4)none

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.

Ripple-65B Preview

A dense 65B coding model from a new lab, pretrained from scratch and released today under Apache 2.0, that Ricursive says leads U.S. open-weight models on Terminal-Bench 2.1. Nobody has checked that yet, and the custom architecture runs only through Ricursive's own SGLang plugin on Blackwell GPUs, with a 57 GB NVFP4 build as the smallest.

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

Ripple-65B Preview

  1. Run Ricursive's launcher from inference/server with uv run --script serve.py on two B200 GPUs; it listens on 127.0.0.1:30000 with a 16K context by default
  2. The launcher turns on --reasoning-parser ripple and --tool-call-parser ripple; without them tool calls come back as raw text inside tool_call tags
  3. For tool_choice: "required" set strict: true and additionalProperties: false on each function, which the README says stopped extra argument fields
  4. Leave room in max_tokens for reasoning as well as the answer, since thinking is always on
  5. Use chat_template.jinja, not the template inside tokenizer_config.json, which has no tool support

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, Agents-A1-4B or Ripple-65B Preview?

Agents-A1-4B scores 61 (C) on agent readiness against Ripple-65B Preview's 53.3 (D), and leads in 1 of 4 scored categories. Ripple-65B Preview leads on agent interface and documentation and upkeep.

Other comparisons with Agents-A1-4B or Ripple-65B Preview

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