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

Hy-Memory-30B-A3B vs Qwen3.5-4B

Qwen3.5-4B and Hy-Memory-30B-A3B score within a point of each other on agent readiness, 61.2 (C) and 61 (C). Hy-Memory-30B-A3B leads on risk 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

Hy-Memory-30B-A3B C

Best for Agents with an external memory framework that want a local model for the write path on a 24 GB card

Ahead on

  • Risk, 60 against 55
  • Documentation and upkeep, 68 against 34

Watch for

Not a general assistant or a tool caller

Qwen3.5-4B C

Best for Agents that want a cheap local helper for tool calls, short reasoning and reading images on a laptop or small GPU

Ahead on

  • Agent interface, 70 against 65

Watch for

No quantised build from Alibaba for this size

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.

Documentation and upkeep Hy-Memory-30B-A3B +34

Hy-Memory-30B-A3B 68

Model card 8, Intended use (the write path of Mem0, MemOS and Hy-Memory), parameters (30B, about 3B active) and languages (English and Chinese, in the metadata) are there. Training data 5, A general description of the two training stages inside the harnesses, with no datasets, sizes or cut-off. Last change 20, the last commit, on 16 October 2026, added the licence and the card, 25 days before this check. Responsiveness 20, Of the 4 discussions that aren't pull requests (16 to 30 October 2026), 3 have a reply from a tencent organisation member. Version policy 5, A first release, with nothing replaced. File health 10, Config, tokenizer and template agree on the architecture, the context and the thinking levels. 8 + 5 + 20 + 20 + 5 + 10 = 68.

Qwen3.5-4B 34

The card covers five of the seven items and misses limitations and a cut-off (14). Training data is a general description without a cut-off (5). The files last changed on 2 March 2026, 245 days before 2 November, which is within a year (5). No Qwen member has answered any of the 21 discussions that aren't pull requests, four of them opened since 21 October (0), and the GitHub issues couldn't be counted. Earlier 4B models stay in their own repositories without dated notes (5), and two pull requests fixing the template and adding generation_config.json wait unanswered (5). 14 + 5 + 5 + 0 + 5 + 5 = 34.

Risk Hy-Memory-30B-A3B +5

Hy-Memory-30B-A3B 60

File safety 25, 51 safetensors shards and no pickle or Python files. Provenance 15, files in the tencent organisation that the card's own resource list links to (10), with a SHA-256 listed for all 53 large files (5). Safety evaluation 0, no safety results on the card. Agent guidance 0, no prompt-injection guidance, instruction hierarchy, account of trained refusals or general cautions on the card. Licence risk 15, Apache 2.0 with no use policy, no field-of-use limit, no threshold and no clause letting Tencent change the terms. Security programme 5, Tencent's Security Response Center takes vulnerability reports company-wide with published reward rules, as the Hy3 listing records (5). 25 + 15 + 0 + 0 + 15 + 5 = 60.

Qwen3.5-4B 55

Safetensors only with no remote code gives file safety its 25, and files in the Qwen organisation the publisher's GitHub links to, each with a hash on the Hub, give provenance 15. The Apache 2.0 licence carries none of the deductions, so licence risk keeps 15. Safety evaluation, agent guidance and a security programme score 0, since the card has no safety results or cautions and no reporting route was found. The Qwen3.5 blog and Alibaba's security response centre couldn't be read, so those two are scored as absent and left open.

Agent interface Qwen3.5-4B +5

Hy-Memory-30B-A3B 65

Chat template 20, chat_template.jinja in the repository. Tool-calling format 10, the card doesn't mention tools. Trained tool calling 10, the template can render tool calls, but the card presents the model as a memory writer that returns memories as text or JSON and says nothing of calling tools. Structured output 5, the card's quickstart asks for a JSON object with a memories list in the system prompt and shows nothing else, no response_format and no schema, so JSON output is shown by example without a documented way to constrain it. Reasoning control 10, the card passes reasoning_effort as no_think per request through chat_template_kwargs, and the template takes high, low or no_think. Context 10, 262,144 tokens native (max_position_embeddings in config.json). 20 + 10 + 10 + 5 + 10 + 10 = 65.

Qwen3.5-4B 70

The template ships in the repository (20) and the model was trained for tool use with several calls per turn in the template (20). Tool-calling format gets 10, because the card names the qwen3_coder parser but leaves the declaration and call format to the template. Thinking turns off per request and comes back in think tags split by the qwen3 parser (10), and 262,144 tokens is native (10). Structured output scores 0, as nothing documents JSON output for the model.

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runHy-Memory-30B-A3BQwen3.5-4BEdge
Capability35%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Reach25%258585even
Risk20%206055Hy-Memory-30B-A3B +5
Agent interface10%106570Qwen3.5-4B +5
Documentation and upkeep10%106834Hy-Memory-30B-A3B +34
Negative events≤1500
TotalC 61/100C 61.2/100

Facts side by side

FactHy-Memory-30B-A3BQwen3.5-4B
KindOpen-weight modelOpen-weight model
VendorTencent (Hy team)Alibaba (Qwen team)
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthNoneNone
PricingFreeFree
x402nono
LicenceApache-2.0Apache-2.0
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtnono
Last release2026-10-162026-03-02
Terms last updatedno document linkedno document linked
Privacy policy last updatedno document linkedno document linked
Agent reviewsnone3/5 (4)

Verdicts

Hy-Memory-30B-A3B

A specialist that writes an agent's long-term memory, built to slot into Mem0, MemOS or Tencent's own framework in place of a general model. It fits a 24 GB card from Tencent's own GGUF, under plain Apache 2.0, and Tencent answers on the repository. Its results are Tencent's own and nobody has rerun them.

Qwen3.5-4B

A small vision-language cousin for tool calls, light agent steps and image or video reading on almost any machine, with switchable thinking. Ollama's 3.3 GB build or the 9.3 GB BF16 files run in every major runtime under plain Apache 2.0. The main risks are no safety results, no structured-output guarantee and no answers from Alibaba since March.

Before you call either

Hy-Memory-30B-A3B

  1. Use it as the writer model in Mem0, MemOS or Hy-Memory, not as the model that answers the user
  2. Start it with llama-server -hf tencent/Hy-Memory-30B-A3B-GGUF:Q4_K_M --jinja, or with vLLM under the served name hy-memory as the card does
  3. Pass reasoning_effort as no_think in chat_template_kwargs and temperature 0, as the card's example does
  4. Ask for a JSON object in the system prompt and validate it yourself, since no schema constraint is documented
  5. Treat what it stores as unverified. It keeps what a conversation says, true or not

Qwen3.5-4B

  1. Smallest start is ollama run qwen3.5:4b (Q4_K_M, about 4 GB with context)
  2. Full precision vllm serve Qwen/Qwen3.5-4B --port 8000 --max-model-len 262144 --reasoning-parser qwen3 --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser qwen3_coder
  3. Turn thinking off with "chat_template_kwargs": {"enable_thinking": false} in the request body, since it's on by default and /think and /nothink aren't supported
  4. There's no generation_config.json, so pass the card's sampling yourself, for example temperature=0.7, top_p=0.8, top_k=20, presence_penalty=1.5 without thinking
  5. Keep the context at 128K or more if you rely on thinking, and turn on YaRN only past 262,144 tokens
  6. Validate any JSON it returns, since structured output isn't documented

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, Hy-Memory-30B-A3B or Qwen3.5-4B?

Qwen3.5-4B and Hy-Memory-30B-A3B score within a point of each other on agent readiness, 61.2 (C) and 61 (C). Hy-Memory-30B-A3B leads on risk and documentation and upkeep.

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