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

DiffusionGemma 26B A4B IT vs Ling-3.0-tiny

Ling-3.0-tiny scores 55 (C) on agent readiness against DiffusionGemma 26B A4B IT's 50 (D), and leads in 2 of 5 scored categories. DiffusionGemma 26B A4B IT leads on risk and agent interface. 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

DiffusionGemma 26B A4B IT D

Best for Agents with about 64 GB of GPU memory that want fast single-user generation from text and images and can accept lower quality than Gemma 4

Ahead on

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

Watch for

No quantised build from Google, so the smallest official build needs the 64 GB band

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

Watch for

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

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runDiffusionGemma 26B A4B ITLing-3.0-tinyEdge
Capability35%353031Ling-3.0-tiny +1
Reach25%255090Ling-3.0-tiny +40
Risk20%207050DiffusionGemma 26B A4B IT +20
Agent interface10%107060DiffusionGemma 26B A4B IT +10
Documentation and upkeep10%106056DiffusionGemma 26B A4B IT +4
Negative events≤1500
TotalD 50/100C 55/100

Facts side by side

FactDiffusionGemma 26B A4B ITLing-3.0-tiny
KindOpen-weight modelOpen-weight model
VendorGoogle DeepMindinclusionAI (Ant Group)
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthNoneNone
PricingFreeFree
x402nono
LicenceApache-2.0MIT
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtyesno
Last release2026-07-152026-08-31
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

DiffusionGemma 26B A4B IT

A fast local generation cousin for low-concurrency work on text, images and video, with optional thinking and Gemma 4's tool format, under Apache 2.0. It needs about 62 GB for Google's BF16 files and runs only in Transformers or SGLang. The main risk is quality, since Google's own figures put it below Gemma 4 26B A4B, and it's labelled experimental.

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

DiffusionGemma 26B A4B IT

  1. Serve it with sglang serve --model-path google/diffusiongemma-26B-A4B-it --dllm-algorithm Gemma4Renoise --trust-remote-code on SGLang v0.5.22 or later, then call /v1/chat/completions
  2. In Transformers, install transformers>=5.11.0 and load DiffusionGemmaForBlockDiffusion with dtype="auto"; generation_config.json already holds the recommended sampler
  3. Turn thinking on with enable_thinking=True in apply_chat_template or <|think|> at the start of the system prompt, read the reasoning between <|channel>thought and <channel|>, and drop it from history before the next turn
  4. Don't rely on temperature, top_p, logit_bias or JSON Schema in SGLang, which ignores or rejects them for this model; validate JSON yourself
  5. Streaming arrives one 256-token canvas at a time, not token by token
  6. Put images before text in the prompt, and pick an image token budget of 70 to 1,120 by how much detail the task needs

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, DiffusionGemma 26B A4B IT or Ling-3.0-tiny?

Ling-3.0-tiny scores 55 (C) on agent readiness against DiffusionGemma 26B A4B IT's 50 (D), and leads in 2 of 5 scored categories. DiffusionGemma 26B A4B IT leads on risk and agent interface.

Other comparisons with DiffusionGemma 26B A4B IT or Ling-3.0-tiny

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