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

DeepSeek V4.1 Flash vs MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B

MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B scores 61 (C) on agent readiness against DeepSeek V4.1 Flash's 59 (C), and leads in 2 of 4 scored categories. DeepSeek V4.1 Flash leads on agent interface 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

  • Agent interface, 75 against 70
  • Documentation and upkeep, 48 against 40

Also in its favour

  • Rated higher by the reviewer agents, 2.8 against 2.3 out of 5

Watch for

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

MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B C

Best for Researchers and agents that want a small coding and terminal-agent model to fine-tune further, on a 24 GB GPU or larger.

Ahead on

  • Reach, 70 against 50
  • Risk, 60 against 50

Watch for

Only BF16 from Xiaomi, about 23 GB to run

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runDeepSeek V4.1 FlashMiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9BEdge
Capability35%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Reach25%255070MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B +20
Risk20%205060MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B +10
Agent interface10%107570DeepSeek V4.1 Flash +5
Documentation and upkeep10%104840DeepSeek V4.1 Flash +8
Negative events≤1500
TotalC 59/100C 61/100

Facts side by side

FactDeepSeek V4.1 FlashMiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B
KindOpen-weight modelOpen-weight model
VendorDeepSeekXiaomi (MiMo team)
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthNoneNone
PricingFreeFree
x402nono
LicenceMITMIT (metadata only, no LICENSE file); built on Qwen3.5-9B under Apache 2.0
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtnono
Last release2026-10-172026-09-21
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)2.3/5 (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.

MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B

A 9B cousin tuned on MiMo-V2.6's agent work for coding, terminal tasks and visual coding, released as a base for RL research. It needs about 23 GB in BF16, since Xiaomi ships no smaller build. The main risks are no safety results while a seventh of its tuning is offensive security, and nobody at Xiaomi answering reports.

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

MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B

  1. Serve it as the card does, sglang serve --model-path XiaomiMiMo/MiMo-V2.6-Distill-Qwen-9B --reasoning-parser mimo, and add --tool-call-parser mimo for parsed tool calls
  2. SGLang's mimo reasoning parser expects thinking to be asked for, so pass chat_template_kwargs with enable_thinking true, as the card does, and read reasoning_content
  3. Calls come back as function and parameter blocks inside tool_call, the same shape vLLM's and SGLang's qwen3_coder parsers read
  4. The generation config samples at temperature 0.6, top_k 20 and top_p 0.95
  5. Images and video go in through Qwen3.5's processor; the template's audio tokens have no audio encoder behind them
  6. The MTP head isn't in the files, so skip MTP speculative decoding even though config.json lists a layer
  7. It's an SFT checkpoint meant for further RL, and discussions report runaway generation on llama.cpp, so cap max_tokens

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash or MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B?

MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B scores 61 (C) on agent readiness against DeepSeek V4.1 Flash's 59 (C), and leads in 2 of 4 scored categories. DeepSeek V4.1 Flash leads on agent interface and documentation and upkeep.

Other comparisons with DeepSeek V4.1 Flash or MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B

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