GLM-4.7-Flash vs Qwen3-4B-Instruct-2507

GLM-4.7-Flash

A small MIT-licensed mixture-of-experts model with about 3B active parameters, for local agent and coding work with several tool calls per turn and optional thinking. It runs in Ollama at about 23 GB and in nearly every common runtime. The main risk is neglect, with no changes or replies since early February and no safety results.

Qwen3-4B-Instruct-2507

A small, fast cousin for instruction following, short tool-calling jobs and long documents on modest hardware, with no thinking step. It runs in about 3 GB at 4 bits on every common runtime, and two providers host it. The main risk is neglect, with no file changes in over a year, no answers from Alibaba and no safety results.

GLM-4.7-Flash

1. On our reference machine start it with vllm serve zai-org/GLM-4.7-Flash --max-model-len 65536 --tool-call-parser glm47 --reasoning-parser glm45 --enable-auto-tool-choice --served-model-name glm-4.7-flash
2. Or run ollama run glm-4.7-flash for the 19 GB q4_K_M build
3. Without the glm47 and glm45 parsers, tool calls and reasoning come back as plain text
4. Use a released vLLM (0.32.0 or later) or SGLang (0.5.22 or later); the card's nightly and pull-request builds date from January 2026
5. Pass chat_template_kwargs: {"enable_thinking": false} for short tasks, since thinking is on by default
6. Set clear_thinking: false to keep earlier reasoning in multi-turn agent work, as Z.ai does for τ²-Bench and Terminal Bench
7. Set the context length yourself, since config.json allows 202,752 tokens and tokenizer_config.json says 128,000

Qwen3-4B-Instruct-2507

1. Quickest start is ollama run qwen3:4b-instruct, 2.5 GB. Plain qwen3:4b is the Thinking-2507 edition, not this one
2. On our reference machine use BF16 with vllm serve Qwen/Qwen3-4B-Instruct-2507 --max-model-len 262144 --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser hermes
3. Use the hermes parser in vLLM or qwen25 in SGLang, the template emits JSON inside tool_call tags
4. Don't pass enable_thinking, this edition never thinks and the card says the flag isn't needed
5. Sampling per the card is temperature 0.7, top_p 0.8, top_k 20 and min_p 0, with presence_penalty up to 2 against repetition
6. Drop the context to 32,768 tokens if memory runs out, as the card suggests
7. Validate JSON yourself or use the runtime's guided decoding, since structured output isn't documented