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

Darwin-36B-Opus vs Ling-3.0-tiny

Darwin-36B-Opus scores 61 (C) on agent readiness against Ling-3.0-tiny's 55 (C), and leads in 2 of 4 scored categories. Ling-3.0-tiny leads on reach and documentation and upkeep. 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

Darwin-36B-Opus C

Best for Reasoning-heavy text tasks on a 32 GB machine or a single 80 GB GPU, where a disclosed training method isn't required

Ahead on

  • Risk, 55 against 50
  • Agent interface, 70 against 60

Watch for

The merge method is proprietary and the current weights include an undescribed targeted refinement

Ling-3.0-tiny C

Best for Agents on a laptop or small GPU that want a fast local model for tool calls and short reasoning, under MIT

Ahead on

  • Reach, 90 against 80
  • Documentation and upkeep, 56 against 51

Watch for

No hosted provider today, and Ollama support is only an unmerged pull request

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runDarwin-36B-OpusLing-3.0-tinyEdge
Capability35%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Reach25%258090Ling-3.0-tiny +10
Risk20%205550Darwin-36B-Opus +5
Agent interface10%107060Darwin-36B-Opus +10
Documentation and upkeep10%105156Ling-3.0-tiny +5
Negative events≤1500
TotalC 61/100C 55/100

Facts side by side

FactDarwin-36B-OpusLing-3.0-tiny
KindOpen-weight modelOpen-weight model
VendorFINAL-Bench (VIDRAFT)inclusionAI (Ant Group)
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthNoneNone
PricingFreeFree
x402nono
LicenceApache-2.0MIT
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtnono
Last release2026-04-232026-08-31
Terms last updatedno document linkedno 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)2.8/5 (4)

Verdicts

Darwin-36B-Opus

A text-only reasoning cousin merged from Qwen3.6-35B-A3B and a reasoning-distilled fine-tune of it, with about 3B active parameters. It needs 32 GB for the publisher's 4-bit GGUF or about 83 GB in BF16, and runs in vLLM, SGLang, Transformers and llama.cpp. The main risks are an undisclosed merge method, a card that disagrees with its files, and no safety results.

Ling-3.0-tiny

A small, quick hybrid reasoning cousin for local agent work, tool calls and coding, under MIT. It runs in about 6 GB from inclusionAI's 4-bit GGUF in released Transformers, vLLM, SGLang and llama.cpp, with no host. The main risks are a card that doesn't match the files in places, the vLLM route running repository code, and no model safety results.

Before you call either

Darwin-36B-Opus

  1. Quickest start is llama-server -hf FINAL-Bench/POCKET-35B-GGUF:Q4_K_M --jinja, about 21 GB of files
  2. On the reference machine BF16 fits, vllm serve FINAL-Bench/Darwin-36B-Opus --reasoning-parser qwen3 --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser qwen3_coder, the parsers for Qwen3.6's format
  3. Thinking is on by default, send chat_template_kwargs with enable_thinking false for short tasks, a switch the card doesn't mention
  4. The card suggests temperature 0.6 to 0.7 and at least 5,120 new tokens for its think traces
  5. generation_config.json stops only on the end-of-text token, so add <|im_end|> as a stop token if a runtime keeps generating after the turn ends
  6. Text only, the vision encoder of Qwen3.6-35B-A3B isn't in these files
  7. Validate JSON output yourself, since structured output isn't documented

Ling-3.0-tiny

  1. Start it with llama-server -hf inclusionAI/Ling-3.0-tiny-GGUF:Q4_K_M --jinja -c 32768, which needs llama.cpp b11772 or a recent release with bailingmoe3
  2. With vLLM 0.32.0, vllm serve inclusionAI/Ling-3.0-tiny --trust-remote-code --enable-prefix-caching --mamba-cache-mode align --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser ling3 --reasoning-parser ling3, which runs the repository's config code
  3. With SGLang 0.5.22, its cookbook uses --reasoning-parser deepseek-r1 --tool-call-parser glm45 for this model, and drop the card's NEXTN flags since tiny has no MTP layer
  4. Thinking is on by default, pass chat_template_kwargs with enable_thinking false for short tasks
  5. Sampling per the card is temperature 1.0, top_p 0.95 and top_k 20
  6. The template keeps earlier reasoning in the prompt, which grows long agent sessions
  7. Validate JSON output yourself or use the runtime's guided decoding, since structured output isn't documented
  8. For a guardrail, inclusionAI's Ling-3.0-tiny-singprobe scores intent, unsafe output and hallucination per token, but only through SGLang and vLLM integration branches

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, Darwin-36B-Opus or Ling-3.0-tiny?

Darwin-36B-Opus scores 61 (C) on agent readiness against Ling-3.0-tiny's 55 (C), and leads in 2 of 4 scored categories. Ling-3.0-tiny leads on reach and documentation and upkeep.

Other comparisons with Darwin-36B-Opus or Ling-3.0-tiny

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