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

DeepSeek V4.1 Flash vs Ling-3.0-tiny

DeepSeek V4.1 Flash scores 59 (C) on agent readiness against Ling-3.0-tiny's 55 (C), and leads in 2 of 5 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

DeepSeek V4.1 Flash C

Best for Teams with a multi-GPU server who want DeepSeek's agent model under MIT, with the hosted API as a fallback.

Ahead on

  • Capability, 69 against 31
  • Agent interface, 75 against 60

Watch for

510.3 GB of files and no smaller build anywhere, so it won't fit the 107.4 GB reference machine

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 50
  • Documentation and upkeep, 56 against 48

Watch for

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

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runDeepSeek V4.1 FlashLing-3.0-tinyEdge
Capability35%356931DeepSeek V4.1 Flash +38
Reach25%255090Ling-3.0-tiny +40
Risk20%205050even
Agent interface10%107560DeepSeek V4.1 Flash +15
Documentation and upkeep10%104856Ling-3.0-tiny +8
Negative events≤1500
TotalC 59/100C 55/100

Facts side by side

FactDeepSeek V4.1 FlashLing-3.0-tiny
KindOpen-weight modelOpen-weight model
VendorDeepSeekinclusionAI (Ant Group)
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthNoneNone
PricingFreeFree
x402nono
LicenceMITMIT
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtnono
Last release2026-10-172026-08-31
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 reviews2.8/5 (4)2.8/5 (4)

Verdicts

DeepSeek V4.1 Flash

A large multimodal agent model with a 1M-token context, documented tool calls, JSON Schema output and a reasoning budget, under MIT. It needs about 612 GB of memory across several GPUs in vLLM or SGLang. The main risks are prompts built from DeepSeek's code rather than a template, no published safety results and no answers in its repositories.

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

DeepSeek V4.1 Flash

  1. DeepSeek's reference run is its inference folder, convert.py with --model-parallel 8 --expert-dtype fp4, then torchrun --nproc-per-node 8 generate.py --ckpt-path "$SAVE_PATH" --config config.json --interactive
  2. In vLLM 0.32.0 the parsers are named deepseek_v41 for both --tool-call-parser and --reasoning-parser. That's vLLM's naming, DeepSeek doesn't document a vLLM command
  3. Build prompts with encoding.py or pip install deepseek-recipe, not the September repository's chat_template.jinja, which an open pull request says trails the 16 October encoding
  4. Tool calls come back in a DSML calls block with a space before calls, invoke and parameter, unlike V4
  5. Set reasoning_effort to 1 to 100, or low, high or max (50, 75, 100), in thinking mode only. Default is 75
  6. Sample at temperature 1.0 and top_p 1.0 and allow 256K or more output tokens, as the card recommends
  7. Without the hardware, call DeepSeek's API as deepseek-flash, which serves this exact update

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, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash or Ling-3.0-tiny?

DeepSeek V4.1 Flash scores 59 (C) on agent readiness against Ling-3.0-tiny's 55 (C), and leads in 2 of 5 scored categories. Ling-3.0-tiny leads on reach and documentation and upkeep.

Other comparisons with DeepSeek V4.1 Flash or Ling-3.0-tiny

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