DeepSeek-V3.2 vs Nemotron 3 Nano 30B A3B

DeepSeek-V3.2

DeepSeek-V3.2 is an MIT-licensed reasoning model trained for parallel tool calls, with thinking chosen per request, for long agent work. It needs about 690 GB of FP8 files, eight 80 GB GPUs in vLLM's recipe and prompts built from DeepSeek's Python. The main risk is neglect, with no file changes since December 2025 and no safety evaluation.

Nemotron 3 Nano 30B A3B

A fast hybrid Mamba-Transformer cousin with 3.5B active parameters for reasoning and tool calling over very long inputs, in every major local runtime. A 4-bit build needs about 22 to 23 GB. The main risks are that NVIDIA's documented vLLM path runs repository code, no safety results are published and NVIDIA hasn't answered reports since March.

DeepSeek-V3.2

1. Start it with vLLM's recipe, vllm serve deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V3.2 --tensor-parallel-size 8 --tokenizer-mode deepseek_v32 --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser deepseek_v32 --reasoning-parser deepseek_v3
2. It doesn't fit the 107.4 GB reference machine at any qualifying build, so call DeepInfra (deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V3.2) or SambaNova (DeepSeek-V3.2) instead
3. Outside vLLM, build prompts with encoding/encoding_dsv32.py and wrap parse_message_from_completion_text in error handling, since DeepSeek says it handles well-formed output only
4. Pick thinking or chat with thinking_mode, and read the reasoning from reasoning_content
5. Send developer messages only for search-agent prompts, the only use DeepSeek gives that role
6. Use temperature 1.0 and top_p 0.95 and keep prompts within 128K tokens

Nemotron 3 Nano 30B A3B

1. Start it with ollama run nemotron-3-nano:30b (18 GB MLX on a Mac, 24 GB q4_K_M elsewhere)
2. On the reference machine use BF16 with vLLM, after wget https://huggingface.co/nvidia/NVIDIA-Nemotron-3-Nano-30B-A3B-BF16/resolve/main/nano_v3_reasoning_parser.py, then vllm serve nvidia/NVIDIA-Nemotron-3-Nano-30B-A3B-BF16 --max-model-len 262144 --trust-remote-code --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser qwen3_coder --reasoning-parser-plugin nano_v3_reasoning_parser.py --reasoning-parser nano_v3
3. NVFP4 needs an NVIDIA Blackwell GPU, and FP8 isn't documented on gfx1151
4. Without the qwen3_coder tool parser and the nano_v3 reasoning parser, tool calls and reasoning come back as plain text
5. Card sampling is temperature 0.6 and top_p 0.95 for tool calling, temperature 1.0 and top_p 1.0 for reasoning
6. Thinking is on by default, so pass enable_thinking as false in chat_template_kwargs for short tasks
7. Set VLLM_ALLOW_LONG_MAX_MODEL_LEN=1 and raise --max-model-len only when you need more than 262,144 tokens
8. In SGLang the main branch names the reasoning parser nemotron_3, not the card's nano_v3
9. Filter untrusted tool results before they reach the model, as NVIDIA warns prompt injection can lead to code execution
10. Validate JSON output yourself or use the runtime's guided decoding, since none is documented for the model