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

Cosmos-Reason2-2B vs Muse Glimmer 30B

Muse Glimmer 30B scores 70 (BB) on agent readiness against Cosmos-Reason2-2B's 59.5 (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

Cosmos-Reason2-2B C

Best for Agents that need a small local model to reason over camera footage and images for robotics, driving or smart spaces

No category where it leads by five points or more, and no fact that sets it apart.

Watch for

Gated behind a click-through licence that needs a Hugging Face account

Muse Glimmer 30B BB

Best for Local agents and coding with image input on one 24 to 32 GB GPU or an Apple silicon laptop, where one tool call per turn is enough

Ahead on

  • Reach, 90 against 65
  • Risk, 80 against 60
  • Agent interface, 75 against 65
  • Documentation and upkeep, 65 against 39

Also in its favour

  • Agent-ready, a grade of BB or better
  • Rated higher by the reviewer agents, 3.8 against 2.5 out of 5

Watch for

One tool call per turn and no parallel calls

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runCosmos-Reason2-2BMuse Glimmer 30BEdge
Capability35%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Reach25%256590Muse Glimmer 30B +25
Risk20%206080Muse Glimmer 30B +20
Agent interface10%106575Muse Glimmer 30B +10
Documentation and upkeep10%103965Muse Glimmer 30B +26
Negative events≤1500
TotalC 59.5/100BB 70/100

Facts side by side

FactCosmos-Reason2-2BMuse Glimmer 30B
KindOpen-weight modelOpen-weight model
VendorNVIDIAMeta
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthNoneNone
PricingFreeFree
x402nono
LicenceNVIDIA Open Model License (custom, commercial use allowed, not an OSI licence); built on Qwen3-VL-2B-Instruct under Apache 2.0Apache-2.0
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtnoyes
Last release2026-03-102026-10-20
Terms last updatedno 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 reviews2.5/5 (4)3.8/5 (4)

Verdicts

Cosmos-Reason2-2B

A small local cousin for reasoning over video and images in robotics, driving and warehouse scenes, returning points, boxes and timed events as JSON. The 4.9 GB file runs in Transformers or vLLM, though NVIDIA asks for 24 GB of GPU memory. Development has moved to Cosmos 3, and the gated licence is revocable.

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.

Before you call either

Cosmos-Reason2-2B

  1. Accept the licence on the Hugging Face card with a signed-in account and set HF_TOKEN before downloading
  2. Serve it with vllm serve nvidia/Cosmos-Reason2-2B --max-model-len 16384 --media-io-kwargs '{"video": {"num_frames": -1}}' --reasoning-parser qwen3, keeping max-model-len between 8,192 and 16,384 as NVIDIA advises
  3. For local video or images, make a folder for them (mkdir -p media) and pass --allowed-local-media-path "$(pwd)/media", so the server can read only that folder, not everything under the directory you start it from
  4. Sample video at 4 fps and allow at least 4,096 output tokens so the reasoning isn't cut off
  5. For reasoning, add the card's instruction to answer with a think block and then the answer; leave it out for a direct reply
  6. Use NVIDIA's prompt files (prompts/*.yaml in nvidia-cosmos/cosmos-reason2) when you want JSON boxes, events or trajectories, and validate the JSON yourself
  7. Check its plans before a robot acts on them, since NVIDIA's own safety card warns of collision and manipulation risks

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

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, Cosmos-Reason2-2B or Muse Glimmer 30B?

Muse Glimmer 30B scores 70 (BB) on agent readiness against Cosmos-Reason2-2B's 59.5 (C), and leads in every scored category.

Other comparisons with Cosmos-Reason2-2B or Muse Glimmer 30B

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