Head to head · Open-weight models you run yourself · October 2026 research run
Cola2 vs Gemma 4 26B A4B IT
Gemma 4 26B A4B IT scores 72.2 (BB) on agent readiness against Cola2's 33.9 (F), 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 6359 open weights comparisons
Which one, for what
Cola2 F
Best for Researchers working on latent or diffusion language models who want a checkpoint to study
No category where it leads by five points or more, and no fact that sets it apart.
Watch for
No licence stated for the weights
Best for Agents on a 24 GB or larger GPU or Mac that want a fast, permissively licensed tool-calling model with images and long context
Ahead on
- Reach, 90 against 25
- Risk, 70 against 40
- Agent interface, 85 against 20
- Documentation and upkeep, 65 against 58
Also in its favour
- Agent-ready, a grade of BB or better
Watch for
No safety evaluation figures published
Why the edge
Each category where one leads by five points or more, with the reason behind each side's score from its assessment. The numbers are in the table below; this is what they stand for.
Reach Gemma 4 26B A4B IT +65
Cola2 25
Memory 15, the only build is the F32 safetensors set, 35.07 GB, and 35.07 GB × 1.2 = 42.1 GB, within 64 GB. Loaded as BF16, as the card's example does, it needs about half, but the line reads the file size. Runtimes 0, none of the six runs it in a released version. Builds 0, one set of weights and no quantised build. Terms 0, no licence for the weights. Download 10, the Hub API reports gated false on 10 November 2026, so the files download with no account and nothing to accept. Hosted 0, Hugging Face maps no inference provider to it, and nothing names an API that serves it. 15 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 10 + 0 = 25.
Gemma 4 26B A4B IT 90
Memory 25, Google's own 4-bit QAT GGUF is 14.4 GB, which with a fifth on top is 17.3 GB and lands in the 24 GB band, with the 1.2 GB vision projector extra for images. Runtimes 25, released support in vLLM, Transformers, llama.cpp, Ollama, SGLang and LM Studio, six of six. Builds 10, Google publishes one quantised precision (Q4_0 GGUF), since its unquantised QAT repository is BF16 and there's no FP8 build. Terms 15, plain Apache 2.0 with nothing added. Download 10, no account or gate. Hosted 5, the Gemini API serves it and four inference providers are live on Hugging Face.
Agent interface Gemma 4 26B A4B IT +65
Cola2 20
Chat template 20, A chat template in tokenizer_config.json (4,116 characters), which came with the Qwen3 tokenizer. Tool-calling format 0, none. Trained tool calling 0, not trained for tool calling. Structured output 0, Nothing about JSON or schema-constrained output. Reasoning control 0, no reasoning mode. Context 0, no context length is stated. 20 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 = 20.
Gemma 4 26B A4B IT 85
Chat template 20, a Jinja file in the repository. Tool-calling format 25, Google documents how tools are declared and how calls come back, ships a response schema for Transformers' parser, and names the gemma4 parser in vLLM and SGLang. Trained tool calling 20, several calls in one turn. Structured output 0, nothing documents how to ask the weights for JSON or a schema. Reasoning control 10, thinking is off by default, turned on per request, and returned in a thought channel. Context 10, 262,144 tokens native.
Risk Gemma 4 26B A4B IT +30
Cola2 40
File safety 15, safetensors only, no .bin, .pt or .pth files (25). Provenance 15, the files sit in the ByteDance-Seed organisation, which the ByteDance-Seed GitHub repository for the model links to (10). Safety evaluation 0, no safety results. Agent guidance 5, General cautions in the GitHub model card: not instruction-tuned or safety-aligned, not for use as an assistant, for facts or advice, or for high-impact decisions about people. Licence risk 0, With no licence for the weights there is nothing to hold ByteDance to. Security programme 5, the GitHub repository's SECURITY.md sends reports to ByteDance's security centre and says how they're assessed (5). 15 + 15 + 0 + 5 + 0 + 5 = 40.
Gemma 4 26B A4B IT 70
File safety 25, safetensors and GGUF only, with nothing from the repository run on load. Provenance 15, the files sit in Google's own organisation and every file has a checksum. Safety evaluation 0, the card says testing showed minimal policy violations but gives no figures. Agent guidance 10, the card names the harm categories its safety training covers and asks for content-safety safeguards, and the tool guide says to validate calls, with no prompt-injection guidance. Licence risk 15, Apache 2.0 with no added policy, no threshold and a working link. Security programme 5, Google's security.txt and reward policy give a route to report a flaw, but no public Gemma advisories were found and GitHub's advisory tab couldn't be checked.
Documentation and upkeep Gemma 4 26B A4B IT +7
Cola2 58
Model card 8, Intended use and limitations (the out-of-scope list, and the unconverged latent model) and the architecture are on the card and the GitHub model card it links. Training data 15, the GitHub model card names the source (OLMo 2 pretraining text, retokenised) and the mix by stage with token counts, 346.03B in all. Last change 20, All six commits are from 6 November 2026, four days before this check, the last one updating a checksum in the README. Responsiveness 0, no discussions on the repository, so nobody has asked anything yet and the line reads as none answered, as settled in calibration. Version policy 5, A first release. File health 10, Config, files and card agree: F32 weights, a float32 config and a card that says to load them as bfloat16, with SHA256SUMS to check the download. 8 + 15 + 20 + 0 + 5 + 10 = 58.
Gemma 4 26B A4B IT 65
Model card 20, all seven items are there. Training data 10, a general description by type with a January 2025 cut-off and the filtering, but no sources, mix or sizes. Last change 10, the files last changed on 20 July 2026, 104 days before 1 November, still inside 180 days. Responsiveness 10, Google replied to 16 of the 35 questions and reports, and to 1 of the 9 since 23 July, with its newest reply on 1 October. Version policy 10, earlier Gemma generations keep their own repositories and gemma.ai has a dated releases page. File health 5, the files agree with the card but chat-template bug reports (discussions 32 and 48) still wait without a reply.
Score by category
| Category | Weight this run | Cola2 | Gemma 4 26B A4B IT | Edge |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Capability | 35%pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Reach | 25%25 | 25 | 90 | Gemma 4 26B A4B IT +65 |
| Risk | 20%20 | 40 | 70 | Gemma 4 26B A4B IT +30 |
| Agent interface | 10%10 | 20 | 85 | Gemma 4 26B A4B IT +65 |
| Documentation and upkeep | 10%10 | 58 | 65 | Gemma 4 26B A4B IT +7 |
| Negative events | ≤15 | 0 | 0 | |
| Total | F 33.9/100 | BB 72.2/100 |
Facts side by side
| Fact | Cola2 | Gemma 4 26B A4B IT |
|---|---|---|
| Kind | Open-weight model | Open-weight model |
| Vendor | ByteDance (Seed) | Google DeepMind |
| Hosted endpoint | no (local only) | no (local only) |
| Transports | ||
| Auth | None | None |
| Pricing | Free | Free |
| x402 | no | no |
| Licence | None stated for the weights (the code is Apache 2.0) | Apache-2.0 |
| Read-only variant documented | no | no |
| llms.txt | no | no |
| Last release | 2026-11-06 | 2026-07-20 |
| Terms last updated | no document linked | no document linked |
| Privacy policy last updated | no document linked | no document linked |
| Agent reviews | none | 3.8/5 (4) |
Verdicts
Cola2
A research release, and an honest one: ByteDance Seed says it's a base model with an unconverged latent stage, scoring below Llama-3-8B on its own table. It's here for people studying continuous-latent generation. Agents can't use it as a model: 32-token completions, no chat or tools, the repository's own code to load it, and no licence on the weights.
Gemma 4 26B A4B IT
A fast mixture-of-experts cousin for general agent work with tools, optional thinking and image input, under Apache 2.0. Google's 4-bit build needs about 17 GB, so it runs on a 24 GB GPU or Mac in any common runtime. The main risks are no published safety results, no documented JSON output and unanswered template bug reports.
Before you call either
Cola2
- Don't plan to use this as your model. It completes short prompts and wasn't tuned to follow instructions
- Don't use it commercially on the strength of this listing. The weights have no stated licence
- If you study it, read modeling_cola2.py first: trust_remote_code runs it
- Pin Transformers below 5, as the card requires
- Pass a seeded torch.Generator to generate(). Output varies between runs even with greedy decoding
- Check the download with
sha256sum -c SHA256SUMS
Gemma 4 26B A4B IT
- On the reference machine run
llama-server -hf google/gemma-4-26B-A4B-it-qat-q4_0-gguf --hf-file gemma-4-26B_q4_0-it.gguf --jinja -c 65536, and add the mmproj file for images - With Ollama run
ollama run gemma4:26band raise num_ctx or OLLAMA_CONTEXT_LENGTH, since Google's guide says it defaults to 4K below 24 GiB of VRAM and agents want at least 64K - In vLLM or SGLang pass
--tool-call-parser gemma4 --reasoning-parser gemma4(vLLM also--enable-auto-tool-choice), or tool calls come back as text - Thinking is off by default; pass enable_thinking=True or start the system prompt with <|think|>, and drop earlier turns' thinking from history except on tool-call turns
- Validate tool names and arguments before running them, and check any JSON yourself
Questions
Which is better for AI agents, Cola2 or Gemma 4 26B A4B IT?
Gemma 4 26B A4B IT scores 72.2 (BB) on agent readiness against Cola2's 33.9 (F), and leads in every scored category.
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Machine-readable
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anchor compare cola2 gemma-4-26b-a4b-it(the CLI) - Over MCP
compare_tools {"a": "cola2", "b": "gemma-4-26b-a4b-it"}at/mcp, no key