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

BigBang-v1 vs Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B

Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B scores 66.2 (B) 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 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

Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B B

Best for Agents on a 128 GB unified machine or Blackwell GPUs that want a long-context, tool-calling reasoning model with documented training data

Ahead on

  • Reach, 75 against 55
  • Risk, 65 against 55
  • Agent interface, 90 against 60
  • Documentation and upkeep, 65 against 46

Also in its favour

  • Rated higher by the reviewer agents, 2.8 against 2.3 out of 5

Watch for

The card's serving commands pass --trust-remote-code

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runBigBang-v1Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12BEdge
Capability35%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Reach25%255575Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B +20
Risk20%205565Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B +10
Agent interface10%106090Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B +30
Documentation and upkeep10%104665Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B +19
Negative events≤1500
TotalC 54.4/100B 66.2/100

Facts side by side

FactBigBang-v1Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B
KindOpen-weight modelOpen-weight model
VendorThe Endless Frontier (endless-frontier)NVIDIA
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthNoneNone
PricingFreeFree
x402nono
LicenceApache-2.0NVIDIA Nemotron Open Model License
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtnono
Last release2026-08-062026-03-11
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)2.8/5 (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.

Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B

A long-context agent cousin with trained parallel tool calls, a reasoning switch and a full account of its training data, under a free commercial licence. It needs about 100 GB of GPU memory, a 128 GB unified machine or Blackwell hardware for NVIDIA's NVFP4. The main risks are serving commands that run repository code and no published 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

Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B

  1. On the reference machine start it with ollama run nemotron-3-super, the 87 GB q4_K_M build, the only one that fits (about 104 GB with the margin)
  2. Raise the Strix Halo GPU memory limit first with amd-ttm --set 100, since the default of about 62.8 GiB is far below what it needs
  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 for every task, as the card says
  5. Thinking is on by default. Pass enable_thinking: false or low_effort: true in chat_template_kwargs for short tasks
  6. For coding agents pass force_nonempty_content: true in chat_template_kwargs, so a cut-off reasoning trace still returns content
  7. Raise context past 262,144 only with the card's flags (VLLM_ALLOW_LONG_MAX_MODEL_LEN=1, --max-model-len 1048576)

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, BigBang-v1 or Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B?

Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B scores 66.2 (B) on agent readiness against BigBang-v1's 54.4 (C), and leads in every scored category.

Other comparisons with BigBang-v1 or Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B

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