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

GLM-4.5-Air vs Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B

Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B scores 66.2 (B) on agent readiness against GLM-4.5-Air's 59.1 (C), and leads in 4 of 5 scored categories. 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

GLM-4.5-Air C

Best for Agents with two to four datacentre GPUs, or a provider account, who want a permissively licensed English and Chinese tool-calling model with wide runtime support.

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

Watch for

Z.ai's smallest build is FP8 at about 135 GB in use, with no 4-bit build of its own

Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B B

Best for Agents on a 128 GB unified machine or Blackwell GPUs that want a long-context, tool-calling reasoning model with documented training data

Ahead on

  • Reach, 75 against 65
  • Agent interface, 90 against 85
  • Documentation and upkeep, 65 against 38

Watch for

The card's serving commands pass --trust-remote-code

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runGLM-4.5-AirNemotron 3 Super 120B A12BEdge
Capability35%355054Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B +4
Reach25%256575Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B +10
Risk20%206565even
Agent interface10%108590Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B +5
Documentation and upkeep10%103865Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B +27
Negative events≤1500
TotalC 59.1/100B 66.2/100

Facts side by side

FactGLM-4.5-AirNemotron 3 Super 120B A12B
KindOpen-weight modelOpen-weight model
VendorZ.ai (Zhipu AI)NVIDIA
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthNoneNone
PricingFreeFree
x402nono
LicenceMITNVIDIA Nemotron Open Model License
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtnono
Last release2025-08-112026-03-11
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)2.8/5 (4)

Verdicts

GLM-4.5-Air

An English and Chinese cousin for agent, coding and tool-calling work, with switchable thinking and wide runtime support. It needs about 135 GB for Z.ai's FP8 build, two to four H100s by Z.ai's figures, and Z.ai and Novita host it. The main risk is age, with files from August 2025 and no answers from Z.ai since.

Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B

A long-context agent cousin with trained parallel tool calls, a reasoning switch and a full account of its training data, under a free commercial licence. It needs about 100 GB of GPU memory, a 128 GB unified machine or Blackwell hardware for NVIDIA's NVFP4. The main risks are serving commands that run repository code and no published safety results.

Before you call either

GLM-4.5-Air

  1. Z.ai's FP8 recipe is python3 -m sglang.launch_server --model-path zai-org/GLM-4.5-Air-FP8 --tp-size 4 --tool-call-parser glm45 --reasoning-parser glm45, and 2 H100s are enough below the full 128K context
  2. Use the glm45 tool and reasoning parsers for this model, the glm47 parser in Z.ai's current README is for GLM-4.7
  3. Thinking is on by default, pass chat_template_kwargs with enable_thinking false for short tasks, which makes the template add /nothink and an empty think block
  4. Declare tools in OpenAI style, and the template renders arguments as arg_key and arg_value pairs that the parser turns back into JSON
  5. Keep prompts under 128,000 tokens, the tokenizer config's limit, though config.json allows 131,072
  6. Validate JSON output yourself or use the runtime's guided decoding, since structured output isn't documented for the weights

Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B

  1. On the reference machine start it with ollama run nemotron-3-super, the 87 GB q4_K_M build, the only one that fits (about 104 GB with the margin)
  2. Raise the Strix Halo GPU memory limit first with amd-ttm --set 100, since the default of about 62.8 GiB is far below what it needs
  3. With vLLM serve it with --reasoning-parser nemotron_v3 --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser qwen3_coder (SGLang uses --reasoning-parser nemotron_3)
  4. Use temperature=1.0 and top_p=0.95 for every task, as the card says
  5. Thinking is on by default. Pass enable_thinking: false or low_effort: true in chat_template_kwargs for short tasks
  6. For coding agents pass force_nonempty_content: true in chat_template_kwargs, so a cut-off reasoning trace still returns content
  7. Raise context past 262,144 only with the card's flags (VLLM_ALLOW_LONG_MAX_MODEL_LEN=1, --max-model-len 1048576)

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, GLM-4.5-Air or Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B?

Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B scores 66.2 (B) on agent readiness against GLM-4.5-Air's 59.1 (C), and leads in 4 of 5 scored categories.

Other comparisons with GLM-4.5-Air or Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B

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