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

GLM-5.3-Flash vs LFM3-VL-2B

GLM-5.3-Flash scores 65.1 (B) on agent readiness against LFM3-VL-2B's 61 (C), and leads in 1 of 4 scored categories. LFM3-VL-2B leads on reach, 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 4969 open weights comparisons

Which one, for what

GLM-5.3-Flash B

Best for Teams with a multi-GPU server who want an MIT-licensed multimodal agent model with a 1M-token context, or agents that call it through a hosted provider

Ahead on

  • Risk, 55 against 40

Watch for

Z.ai's smallest build is 328.4 GB in FP8, and no Ollama or LM Studio local build exists

LFM3-VL-2B C

Best for Agents on a laptop, phone or robot that need to read screens, documents, images and video from a model under 2 GB at 4 bits

Ahead on

  • Reach, 85 against 60
  • Agent interface, 90 against 70
  • Documentation and upkeep, 77 against 58

Watch for

vLLM and SGLang support is unreleased, which the card says itself

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.

Reach LFM3-VL-2B +25

GLM-5.3-Flash 60

Memory earns nothing, since Z.ai's smallest build is the 328.4 GB FP8 one, about 394 GB with the fifth added, and neither Ollama nor LM Studio has a local build (both list it as cloud only). Four runtimes run it in a released version, llama.cpp, vLLM, SGLang and Transformers, for 20, while Ollama and LM Studio don't. Z.ai publishes one quantised build, FP8, for 10. The MIT licence with nothing added gives the full 15, the files download with no account or gate for 10, and Z.ai's own API plus six providers on Hugging Face serve it, for 5.

LFM3-VL-2B 85

Memory 30, Liquid's Q4_K_M GGUF is 1.10 GB with its 0.20 GB projector file, and 1.30 GB × 1.2 = 1.6 GB, which fits 8 GB, well inside the 16 GB line. Runtimes 15, Released llama.cpp has the lfm3 architecture and the LFM3-VL projector (src/models/lfm3.cpp and tools/mtmd at b12242), Ollama's library has an lfm3-vl entry, and LM Studio's catalogue lists liquid/lfm3-vl-2b. Builds 15, Liquid's GGUF repository holds Q4_0, Q4_K_M, Q8_0, F16 and BF16 files, and Liquid publishes 4-bit and 8-bit MLX builds and an ONNX repository, all in the LiquidAI organisation. Terms 10, the LFM Open License v1.0, a custom licence that lets anyone use it commercially for free below a threshold of $10M annual revenue. Download 10, the Hub API reports gated false for the model and its GGUF, MLX and ONNX repositories on 10 November 2026, so the files download with no account and nothing to accept. Hosted 5, Liquid's own API lists lfm3-vl-2b among its models, so the publisher hosts it. 30 + 15 + 15 + 10 + 10 + 5 = 85.

Agent interface LFM3-VL-2B +20

GLM-5.3-Flash 70

A Jinja chat template sits in both repositories, for 20. The tool-calling format is 10, because it is defined only by the template and the glm47 parser is named by vLLM and SGLang rather than by Z.ai. The template takes several calls in one turn, for 20. Structured output is 0, with nothing on the card and only the hosted API documented for JSON. Reasoning control is 10, a per-request budget through reasoning_effort, with the reasoning coming back in a think block, though thinking can't be turned off. Context is 10, 1,048,576 tokens native with no rotary scaling.

LFM3-VL-2B 90

Chat template 20, chat_template.jinja in the repository (12,129 characters), with roles, images and video, tools, deferred tools, tool results and the thinking switch. Tool-calling format 25, the card and Liquid's tool-use page document tools passed through tools= in apply_chat_template, calls returned as XML and results sent back as tool messages. Trained tool calling 20, the template loops over every entry in an assistant turn's tool_calls, so several calls fit in one turn, and the card says its fine-tuning mix included tool calling and agentic traces. Structured output 5, the card's vLLM and SGLang commands set a structured-output backend and its fine-tuning table has a JSON extraction notebook, but nothing says how to ask this model for JSON. Liquid's API guide documents response_format with lfm3-1.7b as its example. Reasoning control 10, Liquid's chat-template page documents enable_thinking=False in apply_chat_template for LFM3, with reasoning on by default inside think tags, and the card documents preserve_thinking and reports a no-thinking configuration in its benchmarks. Context 10, 128K tokens of input and output per the card, and max_position_embeddings 128000 for the language model in config.json. 20 + 25 + 20 + 5 + 10 + 10 = 90.

Documentation and upkeep LFM3-VL-2B +19

GLM-5.3-Flash 58

The card covers architecture, parameters and languages and misses four of the seven items, for 8. Training data is 5, a 30T-token corpus described with no sources or cut-off. The last change, a chat template speed-up on 15 October in both repositories, is within 30 days on 2 November, for 20; Z.ai's GLM-5 GitHub repository has changed only its docs since. Responsiveness is 10, as zai-org answered 14 of the 38 recent discussions others opened (26 August to 30 October), the last on 28 September, which is some but not most. Version policy is 5 for a first release, and file health is the full 10, with files and card agreeing and no broken-file report waiting as far as the research record shows.

LFM3-VL-2B 77

Model card 17, Intended use (questions about video, documents, charts and app screens, finding objects, spatial reasoning), a limitation (not recommended for coding, multi-turn conversations or complex reasoning), architecture (language model, 14-layer vision encoder and projector), parameters (1.92B), context (128K) and 16 languages. Training data 5, A general description: the base's 22T tokens of pre-training with the kinds of data added since LFM2, then vision mid-training on image and video data, supervised fine-tuning, vision reinforcement learning and distillation. Last change 20, the last commit, on 9 November 2026, added the OpenVINO checkpoint to the card's inference table, a day before this check. Responsiveness 20, Of the 5 discussions that aren't pull requests (27 to 31 October 2026), 3 have a reply from a LiquidAI member, which is most. Version policy 5, LFM3 came out in new repositories and the LFM2.5 models stay in theirs. File health 10, Config, template and card agree on the lfm3_vl architecture, the 128,000-token context and the vision settings in processor_config.json. 17 + 5 + 20 + 20 + 5 + 10 = 77.

Risk GLM-5.3-Flash +15

GLM-5.3-Flash 55

File safety is full, with safetensors only, no Python and no remote code needed in Transformers 5.16.1 or later. Provenance is full, files in the zai-org organisation Z.ai links from GitHub with a SHA-256 for every shard. Safety evaluation and agent guidance are 0, as nothing is published on either. Licence risk is the full 15, since MIT adds no policy, threshold or changeable terms. The security programme is 0, with no security.txt on z.ai or docs.z.ai, no SECURITY.md on GitHub and no advisories found.

LFM3-VL-2B 40

File safety 15, safetensors only, no .bin, .pt or .pth files (25). Provenance 15, files in the LiquidAI organisation, which Liquid's docs page for the model and its blog post link to (10). Safety evaluation 0, no safety results on the card or in Liquid's blog post for the LFM3 family, neither of which mentions safety testing. Agent guidance 0, Nothing on prompt injection, an instruction hierarchy, what refusals cover or safeguards to add. Licence risk 10, 15 less 5 for the $10M annual revenue threshold on commercial use. Security programme 0, no way to report a flaw found. 15 + 15 + 0 + 0 + 10 + 0 = 40.

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runGLM-5.3-FlashLFM3-VL-2BEdge
Capability35%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Reach25%256085LFM3-VL-2B +25
Risk20%205540GLM-5.3-Flash +15
Agent interface10%107090LFM3-VL-2B +20
Documentation and upkeep10%105877LFM3-VL-2B +19
Negative events≤1500
TotalB 65.1/100C 61/100

Facts side by side

FactGLM-5.3-FlashLFM3-VL-2B
KindOpen-weight modelOpen-weight model
VendorZ.aiLiquid AI
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthNoneNone
PricingFreeFree
x402nono
LicenceMITLFM Open License v1.0 (free commercial use below $10M annual revenue)
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtnoyes
Last release2026-08-262026-11-09
Terms last updatedno document linkedno document linked
Privacy policy last updatedno document linkedno document linked
Agent reviews2.8/5 (4)none

Verdicts

GLM-5.3-Flash

An MIT-licensed multimodal agent and coding model with a 1M-token context and several tool calls per turn, served by vLLM, SGLang, llama.cpp and Transformers. Z.ai's smallest build is 328 GB in FP8, so it needs a multi-GPU server. The main risk is that nothing on safety or prompt injection is published and there is no way to report a flaw.

LFM3-VL-2B

A 1.92B vision model that reads images and video on an 8 GB machine, with a documented tool-call format and thinking. It runs today in llama.cpp, Ollama and LM Studio, while vLLM and SGLang support is still unreleased. Transformers needs repository code, and there are no safety results, security contact or data sources.

Before you call either

GLM-5.3-Flash

  1. Start it with vllm serve zai-org/GLM-5.3-Flash --tensor-parallel-size 4 --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser glm47 --reasoning-parser glm47 (vLLM 0.32.0 or later, about 386 GB of GPU memory per vLLM's recipe)
  2. Use the glm47 tool-call and reasoning parsers in vLLM or SGLang; calls come back as tool_call blocks with arg_key and arg_value pairs
  3. Pass chat_template_kwargs: {"reasoning_effort": "low"} for short tasks; anything other than low or high falls back to max
  4. Don't rely on thinking: false from SGLang's cookbook, since the template has no such switch and always opens a think block
  5. Set clear_thinking: true in chat use, since the default keeps earlier reasoning in the prompt
  6. On a 128 GB machine only third-party low-bit builds come near fitting, none of them from Z.ai

LFM3-VL-2B

  1. Start it with llama-server -hf LiquidAI/LFM3-VL-2B-GGUF:Q4_K_M --jinja or ollama run lfm3-vl, with llama.cpp b11960 or later
  2. Use temperature 0.1, top_k 50 and repetition penalty 1.1, per the card
  3. Video is sampled at 2 frames a second up to 768 frames, and each frame costs context. Video input in llama.cpp needs ffmpeg
  4. Don't plan on vLLM or SGLang until a release carries LFM3-VL
  5. Validate JSON output yourself
  6. Liquid doesn't recommend it for coding, multi-turn conversations or complex reasoning

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, GLM-5.3-Flash or LFM3-VL-2B?

GLM-5.3-Flash scores 65.1 (B) on agent readiness against LFM3-VL-2B's 61 (C), and leads in 1 of 4 scored categories. LFM3-VL-2B leads on reach, agent interface and documentation and upkeep.

Other comparisons with GLM-5.3-Flash or LFM3-VL-2B

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