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

Gemma 4 E4B IT vs MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B

Gemma 4 E4B IT scores 63.2 (B) on agent readiness against MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B's 61 (C), and leads in every scored category. 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

Gemma 4 E4B IT B

Best for Agents that need a cheap, permissively licensed helper on 8 GB of memory, for tool calls, short audio or images, rather than hard reasoning

Ahead on

  • Reach, 95 against 70
  • Risk, 70 against 60
  • Agent interface, 85 against 70
  • Documentation and upkeep, 75 against 40

Also in its favour

  • Rated higher by the reviewer agents, 3.5 against 2.3 out of 5

Watch for

No safety evaluation figures published

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.

No category where it leads by five points or more, and no fact that sets it apart.

Watch for

Only BF16 from Xiaomi, about 23 GB to run

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runGemma 4 E4B ITMiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9BEdge
Capability35%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Reach25%259570Gemma 4 E4B IT +25
Risk20%207060Gemma 4 E4B IT +10
Agent interface10%108570Gemma 4 E4B IT +15
Documentation and upkeep10%107540Gemma 4 E4B IT +35
Negative events≤1500
TotalB 63.2/100C 61/100

Facts side by side

FactGemma 4 E4B ITMiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B
KindOpen-weight modelOpen-weight model
VendorGoogle DeepMindXiaomi (MiMo team)
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthNoneNone
PricingFreeFree
x402nono
LicenceApache-2.0MIT (metadata only, no LICENSE file); built on Qwen3.5-9B under Apache 2.0
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtyesno
Last release2026-07-202026-09-21
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 reviews3.5/5 (4)2.3/5 (4)

Verdicts

Gemma 4 E4B IT

A small cousin for light agent work, tool-calling loops, transcription and image reading on a phone or laptop, under Apache 2.0. Google's 4-bit build needs about 7 GB with working space and runs in all the common runtimes. Google's card puts it far below larger Gemma 4 sizes on agent and coding tasks, with no published safety results.

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

Gemma 4 E4B IT

  1. On the reference machine run llama-server -hf google/gemma-4-E4B-it-qat-q4_0-gguf --hf-file gemma-4-E4B_q4_0-it.gguf --jinja -c 131072, and add --mmproj with gemma-4-E4B-it-mmproj.gguf for images and audio
  2. With Ollama run ollama run gemma4:e4b and raise num_ctx or OLLAMA_CONTEXT_LENGTH, since the default context is small and agents want at least 64K
  3. In vLLM or SGLang pass --tool-call-parser gemma4 --reasoning-parser gemma4 (vLLM also --enable-auto-tool-choice), or tool calls come back as text; Google's w4a16 build is the 4-bit route there
  4. Thinking is off by default; pass enable_thinking=True or start the system prompt with <|think|>, and drop earlier turns' thinking from history except on tool-call turns
  5. Put images before the text and audio after it, keep audio to 30 seconds and video to 60 frames, and validate tool names and arguments before running them

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, Gemma 4 E4B IT or MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B?

Gemma 4 E4B IT scores 63.2 (B) on agent readiness against MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B's 61 (C), and leads in every scored category.

Other comparisons with Gemma 4 E4B IT or MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B

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