Arete-27B vs OTel-2.0-LLM-31B-IT

Arete-27B

Qwen3.8-27B with its answers on politically sensitive topics retrained, four days old when read. The training data is published, which is rare. Nous Research ships BF16 only, so a small machine runs it from bartowski's GGUF, and the card documents none of the tool or thinking controls it inherits.

OTel-2.0-LLM-31B-IT

A real telecoms post-training of Gemma 4 31B IT with an unusually candid card on what was and wasn't trained. It fits a 128 GB machine in BF16 only, with no quantised build, sits in a personal account, and its weights have been replaced in place. Tool-call format, structured output and safety results aren't documented.

Arete-27B

1. Start it with llama-server -hf bartowski/NousResearch_Arete-27B-GGUF:Q4_K_M --jinja, a third party's conversion, or serve the BF16 files with vLLM
2. Use the base's parsers in vLLM, --reasoning-parser qwen3 --tool-call-parser qwen3_coder, and check tool calls first, since the template differs slightly from Qwen3.8-27B's
3. Thinking switches with enable_thinking in the template. The card's own evaluation ran with it off
4. Expect answers on politically sensitive topics to differ from Qwen3.8-27B's. That is what the fine-tune is for
5. Validate JSON output yourself, since structured output isn't documented

OTel-2.0-LLM-31B-IT

1. Download the 15 shards the index names, not the whole repository, which is twice the size
2. Pin a revision. The card says the weights may change under the same name
3. Serve it with vLLM 0.19.0 or later and the repository's own chat template, not Gemma 4's
4. Send no thinking flags. It answers directly and wasn't trained on Gemma's thought channel
5. Use it as the generation stage of a RAG pipeline over telecom standards, with source attribution and human review
6. Don't use it to run network tools unattended. The card says that hasn't been evaluated