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

Arete-27B vs Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B-Instruct

Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B-Instruct scores 58 (C) on agent readiness against Arete-27B's 55.1 (C), and leads in 1 of 4 scored categories. Arete-27B 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 4969 open weights comparisons

Arete-27BNous Research · Open-weight model C55.1/100#105 of 135 open-weight models Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B-InstructAlibaba (Qwen team) · Open-weight model C58/100#88 of 135 open-weight models

Which one, for what

Arete-27B C

Best for Agents that want Qwen3.8-27B's coding and tool use without its handling of politically sensitive topics, on a 24 GB card or a 128 GB machine

Ahead on

  • Documentation and upkeep, 63 against 36

Watch for

No quantised build from Nous Research, so the GGUF route depends on a third party

Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B-Instruct C

Best for An agent with 24 GB or more to spare that wants a local reader of images, documents and video with 262,144 tokens of context

Ahead on

  • Reach, 95 against 50

Watch for

No safety evaluation, agent-use guidance or security contact

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 Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B-Instruct +45

Arete-27B 50

Memory 10, the only build from Nous Research is the 54.7 GB BF16 release, which needs about 66 GB and fits the reference machine. Runtimes 15, vLLM, SGLang and Transformers run the base's architecture from those files, and llama.cpp isn't credited because Nous Research publishes no GGUF. Builds 0, no quantised build of its own. Terms 15, Apache 2.0. Download 10, not gated. Hosted 0, no provider. 10 + 15 + 0 + 15 + 10 + 0 = 50.

Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B-Instruct 95

Alibaba's own Q4_K_M GGUF is 18.6 GB, so with a fifth added it needs about 22 GB, or 23 GB with the vision file, and fits 24 GB (25). Transformers 4.57.0, vLLM 0.11.0, SGLang 0.5.4, llama.cpp and Ollama all run it in released versions, which reaches the 25 cap. Alibaba publishes FP8 and GGUF builds at Q8_0 and Q4_K_M (15). Apache 2.0 with nothing added (15). No gate and no account (10). Novita, Featherless AI and DeepInfra serve it on Hugging Face, and SiliconFlow too on OpenRouter (5). 25 + 25 + 15 + 15 + 10 + 5 = 95.

Documentation and upkeep Arete-27B +27

Arete-27B 63

Model card 8, no limitations, context length, languages or cut-off. Training data 20, the training pairs and the evaluation set are published with their counts. Last change 20, a commit on 6 November 2026. Responsiveness 0, none of 13 discussions has a reply from Nous Research. Version policy 5, a first release. File health 10, the files agree. 8 + 20 + 20 + 0 + 5 + 10 = 63.

Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B-Instruct 36

The card misses limitations, languages and a cut-off (11). Training data is described only in the technical report, with no cut-off (5). The newest Hub commit is the library-tag commit of 26 November 2025 and the weights haven't changed since September 2025, so the qwen-vl-utils fix of 4 January 2026 in the code that runs it sets the line, within a year (5). Qwen answered none of the eight Hugging Face discussions that aren't pull requests (0), and GitHub issues weren't counted. Earlier versions kept in their own repositories without notes (5). Config, template and card agree and no broken-file report waits (10). 11 + 5 + 5 + 0 + 5 + 10 = 36.

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runArete-27BQwen3-VL-30B-A3B-InstructEdge
Capability35%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Reach25%255095Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B-Instruct +45
Risk20%205555even
Agent interface10%106060even
Documentation and upkeep10%106336Arete-27B +27
Negative events≤1500
TotalC 55.1/100C 58/100

Facts side by side

FactArete-27BQwen3-VL-30B-A3B-Instruct
KindOpen-weight modelOpen-weight model
VendorNous ResearchAlibaba (Qwen team)
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthNoneNone
PricingFreeFree
x402nono
LicenceApache-2.0Apache-2.0
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtnono
Last release2026-11-062025-11-01
Terms last updatedno document linkedno document linked
Privacy policy last updatedno document linkedno document linked
Agent reviewsnone3/5 (4)

Verdicts

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.

Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B-Instruct

A vision-language mixture of experts for screenshots, documents, charts and video, with about 3B of its 31B parameters active. Alibaba's Q4_K_M GGUF with its vision file needs about 23 GB, it loads in Transformers, vLLM, SGLang, llama.cpp and Ollama under Apache 2.0, and three providers host it. No safety work is published, so add guardrails before it drives a GUI.

Before you call either

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

Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B-Instruct

  1. Start it with llama-server -hf Qwen/Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B-Instruct-GGUF:Q4_K_M --jinja -c 32768, or ollama run qwen3-vl:30b-a3b-instruct
  2. In Ollama the plain qwen3-vl:30b tag is the Thinking edition, so name 30b-a3b-instruct
  3. With the GGUF, load the mmproj vision file too, or images won't be read
  4. Parse tool calls as JSON inside <tool_call> tags, or use SGLang's --tool-call-parser qwen
  5. Use the shipped sampling, temperature 0.7, top_p 0.8 and top_k 20, from generation_config.json
  6. Validate JSON output yourself, since structured output isn't documented
  7. vLLM needs 0.11.0 or later, Transformers 4.57.0 or later and llama.cpp b6907 or later

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, Arete-27B or Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B-Instruct?

Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B-Instruct scores 58 (C) on agent readiness against Arete-27B's 55.1 (C), and leads in 1 of 4 scored categories. Arete-27B leads on documentation and upkeep.

Other comparisons with Arete-27B or Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B-Instruct

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