BigBang-v1 vs Nemotron 3.5 Lightning 30B A3B

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.

Nemotron 3.5 Lightning 30B A3B

A small agent cousin, 3B active parameters, with trained parallel tool calls, a thinking switch and up to 1M tokens of context, under a permissive licence. It runs in about 23 GB from the GGUF or Ollama builds, and NVIDIA's NVFP4 build needs NVIDIA GPUs. The main risks are no published safety results and one answered question across two repositories.

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

Nemotron 3.5 Lightning 30B A3B

1. Quickest start is ollama run nemotron-3.5-lightning, about 19 to 25 GB of files depending on the platform
2. On the reference machine use llama-server -hf ggml-org/NVIDIA-Nemotron-3.5-Lightning-30B-A3B-GGUF:Q4_0 --jinja, since the card's Q4_K_M tag doesn't exist there and NVFP4 needs NVIDIA GPUs
3. With vLLM serve it with --reasoning-parser nemotron_v3 --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser qwen3_coder (SGLang uses --reasoning-parser nemotron_3)
4. Use temperature=1.0 and top_p=0.95, as the card says
5. Thinking is on by default. Pass chat_template_kwargs with enable_thinking false for short tasks
6. For coding agents pass force_nonempty_content: true in chat_template_kwargs, which vLLM's nemotron_v3 parser reads so a cut-off reasoning trace still returns content
7. Go past 262,144 tokens only with the card's flags (VLLM_ALLOW_LONG_MAX_MODEL_LEN=1, --max-model-len 1048576) and enough memory