Carbon-X vs Muse Glimmer 30B

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.

Muse Glimmer 30B

A dense 30B multimodal cousin for local agent and coding work with images, documented tool calls and adjustable reasoning. Meta's 17 GB GGUF fits a 24 GB card and runs in llama.cpp, Ollama, vLLM, SGLang and Transformers. The main risks are one tool call per turn, no documented JSON output and a usage policy that adds limits to Apache 2.0.

Carbon-X

1. 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
2. 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
3. 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
4. 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
5. Only A, C, G and T form 6-mers, so filter N and other IUPAC codes first or they become a single oov token
6. Strip the dna tags from answers if you need bare sequence, llama.cpp keeps them in the text
7. Cap max_tokens for next-base questions, long DNA generation is slow and degrades

Muse Glimmer 30B

1. Start it with llama serve -hf meta-models/Muse-Glimmer-30B-GGUF --hf-file Muse-Glimmer-30B-KQuant-17GB-Q4_K_M.gguf -ngl 99 -c 131072 --host 127.0.0.1 --port 8080 --chat-template-kwargs '{"reasoning_strength":"high"}' on llama.cpp b10353 or later, or ollama run muse-glimmer on Ollama 0.32.7 or later
2. In vLLM pass --tool-call-parser muse_glimmer --reasoning-parser muse_glimmer, in SGLang muse for both, in ExecuTorch --tool-parser atem. Without them tool calls come back as plain text
3. Set reasoning per request with chat_template_kwargs.reasoning_strength (low, medium, high or xhigh). llama.cpp and ExecuTorch don't read reasoning_effort, and ExecuTorch rejects it with a 400
4. Expect one tool call per turn and return each result before the next. ExecuTorch's server rejects tool_choice="required"
5. Keep temperature 1.0, top_p 0.95 and top_k 64, don't run greedy, and never stop on <|eom|>
6. Leave max_tokens room for reasoning, since in llama.cpp a request cut off mid-thought returns empty content with finish_reason length
7. For images add Meta's 1.4 GB mmproj GGUF, which takes the build to about 22 GB with the runtime's fifth