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

BigBang-v1 vs NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Bolt E4B 4GB

NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Bolt E4B 4GB scores 61 (C) on agent readiness against BigBang-v1's 54.4 (C), and leads in every scored category. Both do open-weight models you run yourself.

Best open-weight models you download and run yourself for AI agents · All 3260 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

NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Bolt E4B 4GB C

Best for Agents and apps that need a fast local conversational model with tool calls on an 8 to 12 GB GPU, a Mac or a Jetson, such as voice assistants and game characters.

Ahead on

  • Reach, 90 against 55
  • Risk, 80 against 55
  • Agent interface, 85 against 60
  • Documentation and upkeep, 65 against 46

Also in its favour

  • Rated higher by the reviewer agents, 4.0 against 2.3 out of 5

Watch for

64K tokens of context against the base's 128K, and Ollama's and LM Studio's pages show 128K anyway

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runBigBang-v1NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Bolt E4B 4GBEdge
Capability35%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Reach25%255590NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Bolt E4B 4GB +35
Risk20%205580NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Bolt E4B 4GB +25
Agent interface10%106085NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Bolt E4B 4GB +25
Documentation and upkeep10%104665NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Bolt E4B 4GB +19
Negative events≤1500
TotalC 54.4/100C 61/100

Facts side by side

FactBigBang-v1NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Bolt E4B 4GB
KindOpen-weight modelOpen-weight model
VendorThe Endless Frontier (endless-frontier)NVIDIA
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthNoneNone
PricingFreeFree
x402nono
LicenceApache-2.0OpenMDW-1.1
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtnono
Last release2026-08-062026-10-23
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)4/5 (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.

NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Bolt E4B 4GB

A small cousin for voice and device assistants, game characters and robot interfaces, trained for multi-turn tool calls, instruction hierarchy and short spoken replies, with thinking switchable per request. NVIDIA's Q4_K_M GGUF needs about 8 GB, and Ollama and LM Studio carry it. Context is 64K, half the Gemma 4 base, and NVIDIA publishes 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

NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Bolt E4B 4GB

  1. Quickest start is ollama run nemotron-3.5-bolt:e4b, about 8 GB of files, and set num_ctx to 65536 or less, since NVIDIA supports 64K
  2. With NVIDIA's GGUF use llama-server -m Nemotron-3.5-Bolt-E4B-Q4_K_M.gguf -c 65536 -ngl 999 --jinja, and add --reasoning on --reasoning-budget <tokens> to cap thinking
  3. With vLLM 0.31.0 or later pass --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser gemma4 --reasoning-parser gemma4 and the repository's chat_template.jinja
  4. Pass enable_thinking explicitly in chat_template_kwargs, since the template defaults to off whatever the card says, and set skip_special_tokens false as the card's examples do
  5. Use temperature=1.0 and top_p=0.95 in both modes, as the card says
  6. Set conversational_mode true for spoken replies, which appends a brevity instruction to the system prompt
  7. Answer a slow tool at once with a pending tool message, then send the result later as a user message starting TOOL RESULT, as the card's asynchronous pattern says
  8. Keep persistent rules in the system prompt and send state updates as separate user or system messages in order, per the card's prompting guidelines

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, BigBang-v1 or NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Bolt E4B 4GB?

NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Bolt E4B 4GB scores 61 (C) on agent readiness against BigBang-v1's 54.4 (C), and leads in every scored category.

Other comparisons with BigBang-v1 or NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Bolt E4B 4GB

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