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

EXAONE 4.5 33B vs Qwen3.5-122B-A10B

Qwen3.5-122B-A10B scores 63.1 (B) on agent readiness against EXAONE 4.5 33B's 61 (C), and leads in 2 of 4 scored categories. EXAONE 4.5 33B 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 6359 open weights comparisons

Which one, for what

EXAONE 4.5 33B C

Best for Researchers and students working on documents, Korean or multimodal agents who don't need commercial rights

Ahead on

  • Agent interface, 85 against 70
  • Documentation and upkeep, 50 against 34

Watch for

Research and education only. No commercial use of the model or its output

Qwen3.5-122B-A10B B

Best for Agents with a 128 GB unified-memory machine or two large GPUs that want a capable vision-language model with a plain licence.

Ahead on

  • Reach, 80 against 65
  • Risk, 55 against 50

Watch for

Too big for a single 64 GB machine even at 4 bits

Why the edge

Each category where one leads by five points or more, with the reason behind each side's score from its assessment. The numbers are in the table below; this is what they stand for.

Documentation and upkeep EXAONE 4.5 33B +16

EXAONE 4.5 33B 50

Model card 20, Uses (the quickstart's question answering, document and agent examples), limitations, the architecture, the parameters, the context, the languages (in the metadata) and a knowledge cut-off of December 2024 are all on the card. Training data 5, A knowledge cut-off and one line on excluding personal, harmful and biased content, with no sources or sizes. Last change 10, the main repository last changed on 6 July 2026 (dependencies moved to official releases), 127 days before this check, and the FP8 repository on 9 August, 93 days. Responsiveness 0, none of the 5 most recent discussions that aren't pull requests (13 April to 4 May 2026) has a reply from an LGAI-EXAONE member, counted on 10 November by author flags and dates with a script, text not read. Version policy 5, EXAONE 4.0 and 4.0.1 stay in their own repositories and 4.5 came out in new ones, with no dated note on the older cards that we read. File health 10, Config, template and card agree on the architecture and the 262,144 tokens, and a July commit moved the dependencies to released versions. 20 + 5 + 10 + 0 + 5 + 10 = 50.

Qwen3.5-122B-A10B 34

The card covers five of the seven items and misses limitations and a cut-off (14). Training data is a general description without a cut-off (5). The files last changed on 24 April 2026, 192 days before this check, past the 180-day band and within a year (5), and Qwen's GitHub repository holds only a README and licence, so no reference code of Alibaba's changed later. No Qwen member has answered any of the 21 discussions that aren't pull requests, recounted on 2 November (0), and GitHub issues couldn't be counted. It's a first release at this size (5), and a template fix and a run report still wait unanswered (5). 14 + 5 + 5 + 0 + 5 + 5 = 34.

Reach Qwen3.5-122B-A10B +15

EXAONE 4.5 33B 65

Memory 20, the smallest build at 4 bits is LG's IQ4_XS GGUF, 18.03 GB with the 2.57 GB projector, and 20.60 GB × 1.2 = 24.7 GB, within 32 GB. Without the projector, for text only, it would fit 24 GB. Runtimes 15, Released vLLM 0.33.0 has exaone4_5.py, Transformers 5.22.2 has the exaone4_5 model, and llama.cpp b12242 has the architecture, with LG's own GGUF. Three at 5 each. Builds 15, LG publishes GGUF at five quantised precisions, an AWQ build and an FP8 build. Terms 5, Research and educational use only. Download 10, the Hub API reports gated false for all four repositories on 10 November 2026, so the files download with no account and no click-through, though the licence says downloading is acceptance. Hosted 0, Hugging Face maps no inference provider to it, and the card names no API that serves it. 20 + 15 + 15 + 5 + 10 + 0 = 65.

Qwen3.5-122B-A10B 80

Memory earns 10 of 30, since Alibaba's GPTQ 4-bit build is 78.9 GB, about 95 GB with a fifth added, which fits our reference machine but no smaller band. Runtimes reach the 25 cap on released llama.cpp, Ollama, vLLM, SGLang and Transformers. Alibaba's FP8 and GPTQ-Int4 builds give builds the full 15. Apache 2.0 with nothing added gives terms 15, the ungated repositories give download 10, and Alibaba's own Model Studio plus Novita and DeepInfra give hosted too its 5.

Agent interface EXAONE 4.5 33B +15

EXAONE 4.5 33B 85

Chat template 20, chat_template.jinja in the repository (5,930 characters). Tool-calling format 25, the card's vLLM command names the parser, hermes with auto tool choice, and its agentic example calls tools from MCP servers through the OpenAI-compatible API, so declaration and return follow that API. Trained tool calling 20, the card reports agentic tool use among its language results and shows an agent run with several tool servers, and the template renders every call in a turn. Structured output 0, Nothing on the card about JSON or schema-constrained output. Reasoning control 10, enable_thinking is on by default and the card says to set it false for the non-reasoning mode, with an example of each. Context 10, 262,144 tokens per the card's configuration table and config.json, and the card's serve commands run at that length. 20 + 25 + 20 + 0 + 10 + 10 = 85.

Qwen3.5-122B-A10B 70

The template ships in the repository (20) and renders several tool calls per turn for a model trained for tool use (20). Tool-calling format gets 10, because the card names the qwen3_coder parser but leaves the declaration and call format to the template. Thinking turns off per request and comes back in think tags split by the qwen3 parser (10), and 262,144 tokens is native (10). Structured output scores 0, as nothing documents JSON output for the model.

Risk Qwen3.5-122B-A10B +5

EXAONE 4.5 33B 50

File safety 25, safetensors and GGUF only, no .bin, .pt or .pth files and no Python in the repository. Provenance 15, the files sit in the LGAI-EXAONE organisation (LG AI Research on the Hub), which the card's GitHub repository shares a name with and the licence in the repository is LG's (10). Safety evaluation 0, no safety results on the card. Agent guidance 5, General cautions: the limitation section lists inappropriate, biased, incorrect and outdated answers and tells users not to try to induce harmful output. Licence risk 5, 15 less 5 for field-of-use limits beyond the law (no commercial use, no building competing models) and 5 for terms the licensor can change or revoke (LG may amend the agreement at any time, and the licence is revocable). Security programme 0, no way to report a flaw on the card beyond a support contact, and www.lgresearch.ai has no security.txt. 25 + 15 + 0 + 5 + 5 + 0 = 50.

Qwen3.5-122B-A10B 55

Safetensors only with no repository code run on load or to build prompts gives file safety 25, and files in the Qwen organisation the publisher's GitHub links to, each hashed on the Hub, give provenance 15. Plain Apache 2.0 keeps licence risk at 15. Safety evaluation, agent guidance and a security programme score 0, since the card has no safety results or cautions and no reporting route was found. The Qwen3.5 blog and Alibaba's security response centre couldn't be read, so both are scored as absent and left open.

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runEXAONE 4.5 33BQwen3.5-122B-A10BEdge
Capability35%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Reach25%256580Qwen3.5-122B-A10B +15
Risk20%205055Qwen3.5-122B-A10B +5
Agent interface10%108570EXAONE 4.5 33B +15
Documentation and upkeep10%105034EXAONE 4.5 33B +16
Negative events≤1500
TotalC 61/100B 63.1/100

Facts side by side

FactEXAONE 4.5 33BQwen3.5-122B-A10B
KindOpen-weight modelOpen-weight model
VendorLG AI ResearchAlibaba (Qwen team)
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthNoneNone
PricingFreeFree
x402nono
LicenceEXAONE AI Model License Agreement 1.2 - NC (research and education only)Apache-2.0
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtnono
Last release2026-07-062026-02-24
Terms last updatednot read yetno document linked
Privacy policy last updatedno document linkedno document linked
Agent reviewsnone3/5 (4)

How the scores have moved

Verdicts

EXAONE 4.5 33B

A well-documented vision-language model with a full set of builds, tool calling, switchable reasoning, a 256K context and a stated knowledge cut-off. The licence decides whether you can use it: research and education only, output included, and LG can change the terms. Nothing answered on the repository and no safety results.

Qwen3.5-122B-A10B

A strong mid-size cousin for coding, agent steps and reading images or video, with thinking you can switch off per request. Alibaba's 4-bit build needs about 95 GB, which fits one 128 GB unified-memory machine, and several providers host it. The main risk is silence, with no safety results, agent guidance or answers from Alibaba.

Before you call either

EXAONE 4.5 33B

  1. Don't use it, or anything it writes, commercially. The licence covers the output too
  2. Serve it with vLLM and --reasoning-parser qwen3 --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser hermes
  3. Set enable_thinking false for a direct answer. Thinking is on by default
  4. Use temperature 1.0, top_p 0.95 and presence_penalty 1.5 in general, and temperature 0.6 with top_k 20 for documents and Korean
  5. For llama.cpp, load a projector file from LG's GGUF repository with the weights for image input
  6. Its knowledge stops at December 2024

Qwen3.5-122B-A10B

  1. Quickest start on a 128 GB machine is ollama run qwen3.5:122b (Q4_K_M, 81 GB of files, about 97 GB with context)
  2. Alibaba's 4-bit build serves with vllm serve Qwen/Qwen3.5-122B-A10B-GPTQ-Int4 --max-model-len 262144 --reasoning-parser qwen3 --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser qwen3_coder --quantization moe_wna16, though that kernel isn't documented for AMD gfx1151
  3. Use the qwen3_coder tool parser and the qwen3 reasoning parser, as the card's commands do
  4. Turn thinking off with "chat_template_kwargs": {"enable_thinking": false} in the request body, since it's on by default and /think and /nothink aren't supported
  5. Sampling per the card is temperature 0.6, top_p 0.95 and top_k 20 when thinking, and temperature 0.7, top_p 0.8, top_k 20 and presence_penalty 1.5 without
  6. Keep the context at 128K or more if you rely on thinking, and turn on YaRN only past 262,144 tokens
  7. Add --language-model-only in vLLM to skip the vision encoder and free memory for the KV cache when you only need text
  8. Validate any JSON it returns, since structured output isn't documented

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, EXAONE 4.5 33B or Qwen3.5-122B-A10B?

Qwen3.5-122B-A10B scores 63.1 (B) on agent readiness against EXAONE 4.5 33B's 61 (C), and leads in 2 of 4 scored categories. EXAONE 4.5 33B leads on agent interface and documentation and upkeep.

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