Head to head · Open-weight models you run yourself · October 2026 research run
Carbon-X vs DiffusionGemma 26B A4B IT
Carbon-X scores 61 (C) on agent readiness against DiffusionGemma 26B A4B IT's 50 (D), and leads in 2 of 4 scored categories. DiffusionGemma 26B A4B IT leads on risk and agent interface. Both do open-weight models you run yourself.
Best open-weight models you download and run yourself for AI agents · All 3023 open weights comparisons
Which one, for what
Carbon-X C
Best for Agents that need a second opinion on DNA variants and regulatory regions on a 16 to 24 GB machine, without sending sequences to a hosted model.
Ahead on
- Reach, 90 against 50
- Documentation and upkeep, 77 against 60
Also in its favour
- Rated higher by the reviewer agents, 3.0 against 2.5 out of 5
Watch for
Not clinically validated and no wet-lab validation reported
Best for Agents with about 64 GB of GPU memory that want fast single-user generation from text and images and can accept lower quality than Gemma 4
Ahead on
- Risk, 70 against 65
- Agent interface, 70 against 35
Watch for
No quantised build from Google, so the smallest official build needs the 64 GB band
Score by category
| Category | Weight this run | Carbon-X | DiffusionGemma 26B A4B IT | Edge |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Capability | 35%pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Reach | 25%25 | 90 | 50 | Carbon-X +40 |
| Risk | 20%20 | 65 | 70 | DiffusionGemma 26B A4B IT +5 |
| Agent interface | 10%10 | 35 | 70 | DiffusionGemma 26B A4B IT +35 |
| Documentation and upkeep | 10%10 | 77 | 60 | Carbon-X +17 |
| Negative events | ≤15 | 0 | 0 | |
| Total | C 61/100 | D 50/100 |
Facts side by side
| Fact | Carbon-X | DiffusionGemma 26B A4B IT |
|---|---|---|
| Kind | Open-weight model | Open-weight model |
| Vendor | Hugging Face (HuggingFaceBio) | Google DeepMind |
| Hosted endpoint | no (local only) | no (local only) |
| Transports | ||
| Auth | None | None |
| Pricing | Free | Free |
| x402 | no | no |
| Licence | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Read-only variant documented | no | no |
| llms.txt | no | yes |
| Last release | 2026-10-22 | 2026-07-15 |
| Terms last updated | no document linked | no document linked |
| Privacy policy last updated | no document linked | no 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 reviews | 3/5 (4) | 2.5/5 (4) |
Verdicts
Carbon-X
A DNA specialist cousin that another agent calls for variant-effect and sequence questions, with DNA kept on the machine. Hugging Face's Q4_K_M GGUF needs about 12 GB and Q8_0 about 19 GB, on llama.cpp b11742 or later. It isn't clinically validated, it isn't trained for tool calls or reasoning, and the card contradicts its own GGUF repository on llama.cpp support.
DiffusionGemma 26B A4B IT
A fast local generation cousin for low-concurrency work on text, images and video, with optional thinking and Gemma 4's tool format, under Apache 2.0. It needs about 62 GB for Google's BF16 files and runs only in Transformers or SGLang. The main risk is quality, since Google's own figures put it below Gemma 4 26B A4B, and it's labelled experimental.
Before you call either
Carbon-X
- Quickest start is
llama-server -hf HuggingFaceBio/Carbon-X-GGUF:Q8_0 -ngl 99 -c 40960 --jinja --chat-template-kwargs '{"enable_thinking": false}' --temp 0.6 --top-p 0.95 --top-k 20 --min-p 0, on llama.cpp b11742 or later - With vLLM or Transformers pass trust_remote_code, and expect the tokenizer to fetch Qwen/Qwen3-4B-Base at a pinned revision on first load
- Keep enable_thinking false and the card's sampling (temperature 0.6, top_p 0.95, top_k 20), the settings every reported result used
- Keep DNA in files and pass sequences by name, compute positions and base changes in code and send them as context, the card says the model miscounts long sequences
- Only A, C, G and T form 6-mers, so filter N and other IUPAC codes first or they become a single oov token
- Strip the dna tags from answers if you need bare sequence, llama.cpp keeps them in the text
- Cap max_tokens for next-base questions, long DNA generation is slow and degrades
DiffusionGemma 26B A4B IT
- Serve it with
sglang serve --model-path google/diffusiongemma-26B-A4B-it --dllm-algorithm Gemma4Renoise --trust-remote-codeon SGLang v0.5.22 or later, then call /v1/chat/completions - In Transformers, install
transformers>=5.11.0and loadDiffusionGemmaForBlockDiffusionwithdtype="auto"; generation_config.json already holds the recommended sampler - Turn thinking on with
enable_thinking=Truein apply_chat_template or<|think|>at the start of the system prompt, read the reasoning between<|channel>thoughtand<channel|>, and drop it from history before the next turn - Don't rely on temperature, top_p, logit_bias or JSON Schema in SGLang, which ignores or rejects them for this model; validate JSON yourself
- Streaming arrives one 256-token canvas at a time, not token by token
- Put images before text in the prompt, and pick an image token budget of 70 to 1,120 by how much detail the task needs
Questions
Which is better for AI agents, Carbon-X or DiffusionGemma 26B A4B IT?
Carbon-X scores 61 (C) on agent readiness against DiffusionGemma 26B A4B IT's 50 (D), and leads in 2 of 4 scored categories. DiffusionGemma 26B A4B IT leads on risk and agent interface.
Other comparisons with Carbon-X or DiffusionGemma 26B A4B IT
- Agents-A1-4B vs Carbon-X
- Agents-A1-4B vs DiffusionGemma 26B A4B IT
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs Carbon-X
- Apertus v1.5 8B vs DiffusionGemma 26B A4B IT
- Apodex-1.1-mini vs Carbon-X
- Apodex-1.1-mini vs DiffusionGemma 26B A4B IT
- BigBang-v1 vs Carbon-X
- BigBang-v1 vs DiffusionGemma 26B A4B IT
- Carbon-X vs Cosmos-Reason2-2B
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- Carbon-X vs DeepSeek-V3.2
- Carbon-X vs DeepSeek V4.1 Flash
- Carbon-X vs DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731
- Carbon-X vs Gemma 4 12B IT
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- Carbon-X vs Gemma 4 31B IT
- Carbon-X vs Gemma 4 E2B IT
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- Carbon-X vs gpt-oss-120b
- Carbon-X vs gpt-oss-20b
- Carbon-X vs Granite 4.2 3B
- Carbon-X vs Hy3
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- Carbon-X vs InternVL3.5-GPT-OSS-20B-A4B-Preview
- Carbon-X vs Kimi K3
- Carbon-X vs Kolibri-1
- Carbon-X vs Laguna M.1
- Carbon-X vs Laguna S 2.1
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- Carbon-X vs LFM2.5-2.6B
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- Carbon-X vs MiniCPM-o 4.5
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- Carbon-X vs MiniMax-M2.5
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- Carbon-X vs Muse Glimmer 30B
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- Carbon-X vs occamy-1.0
- Carbon-X vs Olmo 3 7B Think
- Carbon-X vs Ornith-1.5-35B-A3B
- Carbon-X vs Ornith-1.5-397B
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- Carbon-X vs Qwen3-4B-Instruct-2507
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- Carbon-X vs Qwen3.6-27B
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- DiffusionGemma 26B A4B IT vs Qwen3.8-27B
- DiffusionGemma 26B A4B IT vs Qwen3.8-Flash-Next
- DiffusionGemma 26B A4B IT vs Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct
- DiffusionGemma 26B A4B IT vs Qwen3-Coder-Next
- DiffusionGemma 26B A4B IT vs Qwen3-Omni-30B-A3B-Instruct
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- DiffusionGemma 26B A4B IT vs Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B-Instruct
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- DiffusionGemma 26B A4B IT vs Qwen3-VL-4B-Instruct
- DiffusionGemma 26B A4B IT vs Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct
- DiffusionGemma 26B A4B IT vs Qwopus3.8-27B-Flash-V2
- DiffusionGemma 26B A4B IT vs Recursive Flint
- DiffusionGemma 26B A4B IT vs SmolLM3-3B
- DiffusionGemma 26B A4B IT vs Spark-X2.6-4B
- DiffusionGemma 26B A4B IT vs Swift 1.5 Qwen3.8-27B
- DiffusionGemma 26B A4B IT vs Swift 1.5 Qwen3.8-Flash-Next
- DiffusionGemma 26B A4B IT vs ThinkingCap (Qwen3.8 27B)
Machine-readable
- This page as Markdown
/compare/carbon-x-vs-diffusiongemma-26b-a4b-it.md· slim.min.md· JSON.json(or sendAccept: text/markdown) - Each listing in full
/api/v1/tools/carbon-x.json·/api/v1/tools/diffusiongemma-26b-a4b-it.json - From a terminal
anchor compare carbon-x diffusiongemma-26b-a4b-it(the CLI) - Over MCP
compare_tools {"a": "carbon-x", "b": "diffusiongemma-26b-a4b-it"}at/mcp, no key