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

DiffusionGemma 26B A4B IT vs Swift 1.5 Qwen3.8-Flash-Next

Swift 1.5 Qwen3.8-Flash-Next scores 52.3 (D) on agent readiness against DiffusionGemma 26B A4B IT's 50 (D), and leads in 1 of 4 scored categories. DiffusionGemma 26B A4B IT leads on risk, 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

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 45
  • Agent interface, 70 against 60
  • Documentation and upkeep, 60 against 40

Also in its favour

  • Rated higher by the reviewer agents, 2.5 against 1.8 out of 5

Watch for

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

Swift 1.5 Qwen3.8-Flash-Next D

Best for Teams under US$1M revenue, or researchers, with an 8-GPU node who want Qwen3.8-Flash-Next with shorter thinking for coding and agent work.

Ahead on

  • Reach, 60 against 50

Watch for

Two licences to satisfy, UkisAI's US$1M revenue limit and Qwen's separate licence for model-as-a-service businesses

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runDiffusionGemma 26B A4B ITSwift 1.5 Qwen3.8-Flash-NextEdge
Capability35%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Reach25%255060Swift 1.5 Qwen3.8-Flash-Next +10
Risk20%207045DiffusionGemma 26B A4B IT +25
Agent interface10%107060DiffusionGemma 26B A4B IT +10
Documentation and upkeep10%106040DiffusionGemma 26B A4B IT +20
Negative events≤1500
TotalD 50/100D 52.3/100

Facts side by side

FactDiffusionGemma 26B A4B ITSwift 1.5 Qwen3.8-Flash-Next
KindOpen-weight modelOpen-weight model
VendorGoogle DeepMindUkisAI
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthNoneNone
PricingFreeFree
x402nono
LicenceApache-2.0Swift Open License v1.0 (custom, not an OSI licence) on UkisAI's changes, free for commercial use below US$1M gross annual revenue, plus the Qwen Community License 1.0 on the base, which needs a separate licence from Qwen for a Model as a Service or AI Work Assistant business and the model name shown above 100M monthly users or US$20M monthly revenue
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtyesno
Last release2026-07-152026-09-24
Terms last updatedno 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)1.8/5 (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.

Swift 1.5 Qwen3.8-Flash-Next

A large mixture-of-experts cousin, Qwen3.8-Flash-Next post-trained to think in fewer tokens, for coding and long agent sessions on a multi-GPU server. Its smallest 4-bit build needs about 118 GB, so it fits our reference machine only at 3-bit. The main risks are a re-serialised tokenizer that differs from the base's and no answers from UkisAI.

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

Swift 1.5 Qwen3.8-Flash-Next

  1. On a multi-GPU node use vllm serve ukisai/Swift1.5-Qwen3.8-Flash-Next --tensor-parallel-size 8 --max-model-len 262144 --reasoning-parser qwen3 --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser qwen3_coder, the parser the base's recipes and the card's SGLang command use
  2. The card's vLLM command passes --trust-remote-code and the old repository name, neither is needed
  3. On our reference machine only UkisAI's GSQ-RCO IQ3_S GGUF (84.7 GB with the projector) fits, below 4-bit
  4. Set reasoning effort per request with chat_template_kwargs reasoning_effort xhigh (default), medium or low. UkisAI's own runs lose about 2.5 points at medium and low
  5. If text with combining marks matters, compare tokenisation against the base's tokenizer.json before trusting outputs
  6. Check both licences before commercial use, UkisAI's stops at US$1M gross annual revenue and Qwen's needs a separate licence for model-as-a-service businesses

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, DiffusionGemma 26B A4B IT or Swift 1.5 Qwen3.8-Flash-Next?

Swift 1.5 Qwen3.8-Flash-Next scores 52.3 (D) on agent readiness against DiffusionGemma 26B A4B IT's 50 (D), and leads in 1 of 4 scored categories. DiffusionGemma 26B A4B IT leads on risk, agent interface and documentation and upkeep.

Other comparisons with DiffusionGemma 26B A4B IT or Swift 1.5 Qwen3.8-Flash-Next

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