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

BigBang-v1 vs Darwin-36B-Opus

Darwin-36B-Opus scores 61 (C) on agent readiness against BigBang-v1's 54.4 (C), and leads in 3 of 4 scored categories. 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

BigBang-v1 C

Best for Agents with 96 GB or more that want an Apache 2.0 mixture-of-experts model tuned for research, search and coding, and can do without publisher support.

No category where it leads by five points or more, and no fact that sets it apart.

Watch for

BF16 is the only build from the publisher, needing about 86 GB

Darwin-36B-Opus C

Best for Reasoning-heavy text tasks on a 32 GB machine or a single 80 GB GPU, where a disclosed training method isn't required

Ahead on

  • Reach, 80 against 55
  • Agent interface, 70 against 60
  • Documentation and upkeep, 51 against 46

Watch for

The merge method is proprietary and the current weights include an undescribed targeted refinement

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runBigBang-v1Darwin-36B-OpusEdge
Capability35%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Reach25%255580Darwin-36B-Opus +25
Risk20%205555even
Agent interface10%106070Darwin-36B-Opus +10
Documentation and upkeep10%104651Darwin-36B-Opus +5
Negative events≤1500
TotalC 54.4/100C 61/100

Facts side by side

FactBigBang-v1Darwin-36B-Opus
KindOpen-weight modelOpen-weight model
VendorThe Endless Frontier (endless-frontier)FINAL-Bench (VIDRAFT)
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthNoneNone
PricingFreeFree
x402nono
LicenceApache-2.0Apache-2.0
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtnono
Last release2026-08-062026-04-23
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 reviews2.3/5 (4)2.5/5 (4)

Verdicts

BigBang-v1

A Qwen3.6-35B-A3B fine-tuned on synthetic research problems, under plain Apache 2.0, for search, science and coding work. The publisher ships BF16 only, about 86 GB to run, and has no report, safety results or replies to questions, so smaller builds and support come from others.

Darwin-36B-Opus

A text-only reasoning cousin merged from Qwen3.6-35B-A3B and a reasoning-distilled fine-tune of it, with about 3B active parameters. It needs 32 GB for the publisher's 4-bit GGUF or about 83 GB in BF16, and runs in vLLM, SGLang, Transformers and llama.cpp. The main risks are an undisclosed merge method, a card that disagrees with its files, and no safety results.

Before you call either

BigBang-v1

  1. On the reference machine use vllm serve endless-frontier/BigBang-v1 --max-model-len 131072 --reasoning-parser qwen3 --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser qwen3_coder
  2. The card says to keep at least 128K of context so its thinking isn't cut short
  3. Thinking control isn't documented, try the base template's enable_thinking false in chat_template_kwargs and check the output
  4. For a smaller build you'll need someone else's quantisation, the publisher has none
  5. Validate JSON output yourself or use the runtime's guided decoding

Darwin-36B-Opus

  1. Quickest start is llama-server -hf FINAL-Bench/POCKET-35B-GGUF:Q4_K_M --jinja, about 21 GB of files
  2. On the reference machine BF16 fits, vllm serve FINAL-Bench/Darwin-36B-Opus --reasoning-parser qwen3 --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser qwen3_coder, the parsers for Qwen3.6's format
  3. Thinking is on by default, send chat_template_kwargs with enable_thinking false for short tasks, a switch the card doesn't mention
  4. The card suggests temperature 0.6 to 0.7 and at least 5,120 new tokens for its think traces
  5. generation_config.json stops only on the end-of-text token, so add <|im_end|> as a stop token if a runtime keeps generating after the turn ends
  6. Text only, the vision encoder of Qwen3.6-35B-A3B isn't in these files
  7. Validate JSON output yourself, since structured output isn't documented

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, BigBang-v1 or Darwin-36B-Opus?

Darwin-36B-Opus scores 61 (C) on agent readiness against BigBang-v1's 54.4 (C), and leads in 3 of 4 scored categories.

Other comparisons with BigBang-v1 or Darwin-36B-Opus

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