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

gpt-oss-120b vs Ling-3.0-tiny

gpt-oss-120b scores 70.2 (BB) on agent readiness against Ling-3.0-tiny's 55 (C), and leads in 3 of 5 scored categories. Ling-3.0-tiny leads on reach 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 2870 open weights comparisons

Which one, for what

gpt-oss-120b BB

Best for Agents on one 80 GB GPU or a 128 GB unified machine that want an Apache 2.0 reasoning model with wide runtime support

Ahead on

  • Capability, 54 against 31
  • Risk, 95 against 50
  • Agent interface, 90 against 60

Also in its favour

  • Agent-ready, a grade of BB or better
  • Rated higher by the reviewer agents, 3.5 against 2.8 out of 5

Watch for

Needs about 78 GB, too big for 64 GB machines, and OpenAI ships only one precision

Ling-3.0-tiny C

Best for Agents on a laptop or small GPU that want a fast local model for tool calls and short reasoning, under MIT

Ahead on

  • Reach, 90 against 75
  • Documentation and upkeep, 56 against 45

Watch for

No hosted provider today, and Ollama support is only an unmerged pull request

Score by category

CategoryWeight this rungpt-oss-120bLing-3.0-tinyEdge
Capability35%355431gpt-oss-120b +23
Reach25%257590Ling-3.0-tiny +15
Risk20%209550gpt-oss-120b +45
Agent interface10%109060gpt-oss-120b +30
Documentation and upkeep10%104556Ling-3.0-tiny +11
Negative events≤1500
TotalBB 70.2/100C 55/100

Facts side by side

Factgpt-oss-120bLing-3.0-tiny
KindOpen-weight modelOpen-weight model
VendorOpenAIinclusionAI (Ant Group)
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthNoneNone
PricingFreeFree
x402nono
LicenceApache-2.0MIT
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtnono
Last release2025-08-262026-08-31
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)2.8/5 (4)

Verdicts

gpt-oss-120b

A reasoning and agent cousin that runs in most runtimes under Apache 2.0 with published safety work. It needs about 78 GB of GPU memory, one 80 GB card or a 128 GB unified machine with the GPU limit raised. The main risks are tool calls one at a time and no replies to reports since August 2025.

Ling-3.0-tiny

A small, quick hybrid reasoning cousin for local agent work, tool calls and coding, under MIT. It runs in about 6 GB from inclusionAI's 4-bit GGUF in released Transformers, vLLM, SGLang and llama.cpp, with no host. The main risks are a card that doesn't match the files in places, the vLLM route running repository code, and no model safety results.

Before you call either

gpt-oss-120b

  1. Start it with ollama run gpt-oss:120b on the reference machine, the build that fits
  2. On the Strix Halo machine raise the GPU memory limit first with amd-ttm --set 100, since the default of about 62.8 GiB is below the 78 GB it needs
  3. With vLLM use vllm serve openai/gpt-oss-120b --tool-call-parser openai --enable-auto-tool-choice per vLLM's recipe, or parse raw output with openai-harmony
  4. Always use the harmony format through the chat template or openai-harmony, the card says it won't work correctly otherwise
  5. Set Reasoning: low in the system message for short tasks, medium is the default
  6. Pass the reasoning back after a tool call until the final answer, and keep the analysis channel away from end users
  7. Expect one tool call per turn and loop, don't wait for parallel calls

Ling-3.0-tiny

  1. Start it with llama-server -hf inclusionAI/Ling-3.0-tiny-GGUF:Q4_K_M --jinja -c 32768, which needs llama.cpp b11772 or a recent release with bailingmoe3
  2. With vLLM 0.32.0, vllm serve inclusionAI/Ling-3.0-tiny --trust-remote-code --enable-prefix-caching --mamba-cache-mode align --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser ling3 --reasoning-parser ling3, which runs the repository's config code
  3. With SGLang 0.5.22, its cookbook uses --reasoning-parser deepseek-r1 --tool-call-parser glm45 for this model, and drop the card's NEXTN flags since tiny has no MTP layer
  4. Thinking is on by default, pass chat_template_kwargs with enable_thinking false for short tasks
  5. Sampling per the card is temperature 1.0, top_p 0.95 and top_k 20
  6. The template keeps earlier reasoning in the prompt, which grows long agent sessions
  7. Validate JSON output yourself or use the runtime's guided decoding, since structured output isn't documented
  8. For a guardrail, inclusionAI's Ling-3.0-tiny-singprobe scores intent, unsafe output and hallucination per token, but only through SGLang and vLLM integration branches

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, gpt-oss-120b or Ling-3.0-tiny?

gpt-oss-120b scores 70.2 (BB) on agent readiness against Ling-3.0-tiny's 55 (C), and leads in 3 of 5 scored categories. Ling-3.0-tiny leads on reach and documentation and upkeep.

Other comparisons with gpt-oss-120b or Ling-3.0-tiny

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