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

Cola2 vs Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct

Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct scores 55.7 (C) on agent readiness against Cola2's 33.9 (F), and leads in 3 of 4 scored categories. Cola2 leads on documentation and upkeep. 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

Ahead on

  • Documentation and upkeep, 58 against 31

Watch for

No licence stated for the weights

Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct C

Best for Coding agents and local coding tools that want an open model on one 24 GB GPU or a 32 GB Mac, with a plain licence.

Ahead on

  • Reach, 90 against 25
  • Risk, 55 against 40
  • Agent interface, 75 against 20

Watch for

No safety results, prompt-injection guidance or security contact, though it's meant to run commands

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 Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct +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.

Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct 90

Memory 25 of 30, LM Studio's MLX 4-bit build is 17.2 GB and Ollama's 4-bit build 19 GB, 21 to 23 GB with a fifth added, which fits 24 GB. Runtimes 25, released Transformers, vLLM, SGLang and llama.cpp run the qwen3_moe architecture, vLLM and SGLang carry a qwen3_coder parser, Ollama's released build pins a llama.cpp that has qwen3moe, and LM Studio's catalogue carries it. Builds 10 of 15, Alibaba's only quantised build is FP8. Terms 15, Apache 2.0 with nothing added. Download 10, neither repository is gated. Hosted 5, Featherless AI on Hugging Face (live on 4 November 2026) plus SiliconFlow and Amazon Bedrock on OpenRouter (per 21 October, not re-read) serve it. 25 + 25 + 10 + 15 + 10 + 5 = 90.

Agent interface Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct +55

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.

Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct 75

Chat template 20, chat_template.jinja in the repository. Tool-calling format 25, the card shows how tools are declared, the README names the parser for SGLang and vLLM, and the repository ships it. Trained tool calling 20, the template renders several calls a turn and the training used agent reinforcement learning. Structured output 0, not documented. Reasoning control 0, the model has no thinking. Context 10, 262,144 tokens native, with the YaRN extension not counted. Template, parser and config unchanged on 4 November. 20 + 25 + 20 + 0 + 0 + 10 = 75.

Documentation and upkeep Cola2 +27

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.

Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct 31

Model card 11 of 20, intended use, architecture, parameters and context are there, but limitations, languages and a knowledge cut-off aren't. Training data 5, the blog describes the mix in general terms without a cut-off. Last change 5, config.json was corrected on 3 December 2025, 336 days before the 4 November 2026 check. Responsiveness 0, counted by script on 4 November, none of 26 discussions has a reply from Alibaba's Qwen staff, and the one Hub-flagged member who replied is the independent quantiser bartowski. Version policy 5, a first release. File health 5, the files now agree with the card, but reports about the parser and an attention error wait without a reply. 11 + 5 + 5 + 0 + 5 + 5 = 31.

Risk Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct +15

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.

Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct 55

File safety 25, safetensors weights, and the shipped parser script runs neither to load the model nor to build prompts. Provenance 15, the files are in the Qwen organisation that Qwen's GitHub links to, with a checksum on every file. Safety evaluation 0, none published. Agent guidance 0, nothing on prompt injection, refusals or safeguards, though it's sold for agents that run commands. Licence risk 15, plain Apache 2.0 that hasn't changed. Security programme 0, no security.txt, disclosure policy or security contact for Qwen was found, and Alibaba's group security centre couldn't be checked, so it's scored as absent. Files unchanged on 4 November, and QwenLM/Qwen3-Coder still has no SECURITY.md. 25 + 15 + 0 + 0 + 15 + 0 = 55.

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runCola2Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-InstructEdge
Capability35%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Reach25%252590Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct +65
Risk20%204055Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct +15
Agent interface10%102075Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct +55
Documentation and upkeep10%105831Cola2 +27
Negative events≤1500
TotalF 33.9/100C 55.7/100

Facts side by side

FactCola2Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct
KindOpen-weight modelOpen-weight model
VendorByteDance (Seed)Alibaba (Qwen team)
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthNoneNone
PricingFreeFree
x402nono
LicenceNone stated for the weights (the code is Apache 2.0)Apache-2.0
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtnono
Last release2026-11-062025-12-03
Terms last updatedno document linkedno document linked
Privacy policy last updatedno document linkedno document linked
Agent reviewsnone2.8/5 (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.

Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct

A coding model with 3.3B of 30.5B parameters active per token, for agentic coding tools, repository reading and fill-in-the-middle without a thinking step. It needs about 21 to 23 GB at 4 bits under Apache 2.0, and several providers host it. It runs commands for agents with no safety results or prompt-injection guidance, and Alibaba hasn't answered its discussions.

Before you call either

Cola2

  1. Don't plan to use this as your model. It completes short prompts and wasn't tuned to follow instructions
  2. Don't use it commercially on the strength of this listing. The weights have no stated licence
  3. If you study it, read modeling_cola2.py first: trust_remote_code runs it
  4. Pin Transformers below 5, as the card requires
  5. Pass a seeded torch.Generator to generate(). Output varies between runs even with greedy decoding
  6. Check the download with sha256sum -c SHA256SUMS

Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct

  1. Quickest start is ollama run qwen3-coder:30b, 19 GB
  2. On our reference machine use BF16 with vllm serve Qwen/Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct --max-model-len 262144 --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser qwen3_coder, 61 GB of weights fits the GPU share
  3. Use the qwen3_coder parser in vLLM or SGLang, not hermes, since calls come back as function and parameter blocks rather than JSON
  4. Pass tool-call arguments in the history as objects, the template iterates them as a mapping
  5. Sampling per the card is temperature 0.7, top_p 0.8, top_k 20 and repetition_penalty 1.05, with up to 65,536 output tokens
  6. For code completion use the fill-in-the-middle tokens <|fim_prefix|>, <|fim_suffix|> and <|fim_middle|> from Qwen's README
  7. Sandbox the commands and files it touches, since nothing from Alibaba covers prompt injection

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, Cola2 or Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct?

Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct scores 55.7 (C) on agent readiness against Cola2's 33.9 (F), and leads in 3 of 4 scored categories. Cola2 leads on documentation and upkeep.

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