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

Hy-Memory-30B-A3B vs ThinkingCap (Qwen3.8 27B)

Hy-Memory-30B-A3B and ThinkingCap (Qwen3.8 27B) score within a point of each other on agent readiness, 61 (C) and 61 (C). ThinkingCap (Qwen3.8 27B) leads on agent interface. 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

  • Reach, 85 against 75
  • Risk, 60 against 45
  • Documentation and upkeep, 68 against 53

Watch for

Not a general assistant or a tool caller

ThinkingCap (Qwen3.8 27B) C

Best for Small teams and individuals running Qwen3.8-27B for agent or reasoning work who want shorter thinking traces on one 24 GB GPU or Mac.

Ahead on

  • Agent interface, 70 against 65

Watch for

PolyForm Small Business licence, free commercially only below 100 people and 1,000,000 USD (2019) revenue

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.

Risk Hy-Memory-30B-A3B +15

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.

ThinkingCap (Qwen3.8 27B) 45

File safety 25, safetensors only and no code in the repository. Provenance 10 of 15, the files are in BottleCap's verified organisation, but the Hub hides the gated files' SHA-256 from the public, so checksums couldn't be confirmed. Safety evaluation 0, none published. Agent guidance 0. Licence risk 10, 5 off for the size and revenue threshold. Security programme 0, no security.txt, disclosure policy or security contact.

Documentation and upkeep Hy-Memory-30B-A3B +15

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.

ThinkingCap (Qwen3.8 27B) 53

Model card 8 of 20, intended use, limitations and parameters are there, but architecture, context, languages and a cut-off aren't. Training data 0, not described. Last change 20, BottleCap's GGUF build of the model changed its card on 7 October 2026, 27 days ago. Responsiveness 10, BottleCap answered 4 of 8 discussions on the main repository. Version policy 5, the earlier ThinkingCap stays in its own repository with an undated pointer to this one. File health 10, the readable metadata and builds agree and no broken-file report waits.

Reach Hy-Memory-30B-A3B +10

Hy-Memory-30B-A3B 85

Memory 25, Tencent's own Q4_K_M GGUF is 18.24 GB, and 18.24 GB × 1.2 = 21.9 GB, which fits 24 GB but not 16 GB. Its Q3_K_M file and the two files with experts at 1 or 2 bits are below 4-bit precision and don't count. Runtimes 20, hy_v3 model code in released vLLM (HYV3ForCausalLM in the v0.33.0 registry), SGLang v0.5.23 (hunyuan_v3.py), Transformers v5.22.2 and llama.cpp b12242, 5 each. Builds 15, Tencent publishes an FP8 repository and a GGUF repository with Q4_K_M, Q6_K and Q8_0 files in its own organisation, so quantised builds at two precisions or more. Terms 15, Apache 2.0, with only a preamble naming Tencent as copyright holder above the licence text. Download 10, gated is false for the main, FP8 and GGUF repositories on 10 November 2026, so the files download with no account or terms to accept. Hosted 0, Hugging Face lists no inference provider for the model (an empty provider mapping on 10 November 2026), and the card names no API. 25 + 20 + 15 + 15 + 10 + 0 = 85.

ThinkingCap (Qwen3.8 27B) 75

Memory 25 of 30, BottleCap's IQ4_XS GGUF is 15.5 GB, 18.6 GB with a fifth added, which fits 24 GB. Runtimes 20, it keeps the base's qwen3_5 architecture, which llama.cpp, vLLM, SGLang and Transformers run in released versions, while Ollama's entry is the base's. Builds 15, FP8, NVFP4, MLX and GGUF from BottleCap. Terms 10, PolyForm Small Business is free commercially only below 100 people and 1,000,000 USD (2019) revenue. Download 5, the main repository is gated behind a click-through with an account and contact details, though the GGUF, NVFP4 and MLX builds aren't. Hosted 0, no API or inference provider serves it.

Agent interface ThinkingCap (Qwen3.8 27B) +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.

ThinkingCap (Qwen3.8 27B) 70

Chat template 20, the same Jinja template as Qwen3.8-27B, in the repository. Tool-calling format 10 of 25, the card names the parsers but the format lives only in the template. Trained tool calling 20, several calls a turn, and BottleCap evaluated agent tasks. Structured output 0, not documented. Reasoning control 10, reasoning_effort budgets thinking per request and the card says where the reasoning comes back. Context 10, 262,144 tokens.

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runHy-Memory-30B-A3BThinkingCap (Qwen3.8 27B)Edge
Capability35%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Reach25%258575Hy-Memory-30B-A3B +10
Risk20%206045Hy-Memory-30B-A3B +15
Agent interface10%106570ThinkingCap (Qwen3.8 27B) +5
Documentation and upkeep10%106853Hy-Memory-30B-A3B +15
Negative events≤1500
TotalC 61/100C 61/100

Facts side by side

FactHy-Memory-30B-A3BThinkingCap (Qwen3.8 27B)
KindOpen-weight modelOpen-weight model
VendorTencent (Hy team)BottleCap AI
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthNoneNone
PricingFreeFree
x402nono
LicenceApache-2.0PolyForm-Small-Business-1.0.0
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtnono
Last release2026-10-162026-10-06
Terms last updatedno document linkedno document linked
Privacy policy last updatedno document linked2026-01-21
Agent reviewsnone2.5/5 (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.

ThinkingCap (Qwen3.8 27B)

A Qwen3.8-27B with shorter reasoning, for agent work where thinking tokens cost time, and BottleCap's 4-bit GGUF runs in about 19 GB. The main limits are the licence, which needs a paid licence above 100 people or 1,000,000 USD revenue, a gated main repository, and no safety results or training-data description.

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

ThinkingCap (Qwen3.8 27B)

  1. Check the licence first, an organisation with 100 or more people or 1,000,000 USD (2019) revenue needs a commercial licence from BottleCap
  2. For files without the gate use llama-server -hf bottlecapai/ThinkingCap-Qwen3.8-27B-GGUF:Q4_K_M --jinja, about 17.4 GB
  3. On vLLM use --reasoning-parser qwen3 --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser qwen3_xml, and on SGLang --tool-call-parser qwen3_coder
  4. Set reasoning_effort (xhigh, medium or low) in chat_template_kwargs, any other value makes the template raise an error
  5. Keep the base's sampling (temperature 1.0, top_p 0.95, top_k 20), the GGUF card says greedy decoding can loop
  6. The GGUFs carry an MTP head, and llama.cpp builds without MTP support for this architecture may refuse to load them with a missing blk.64 tensor

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, Hy-Memory-30B-A3B or ThinkingCap (Qwen3.8 27B)?

Hy-Memory-30B-A3B and ThinkingCap (Qwen3.8 27B) score within a point of each other on agent readiness, 61 (C) and 61 (C). ThinkingCap (Qwen3.8 27B) leads on agent interface.

Other comparisons with Hy-Memory-30B-A3B or ThinkingCap (Qwen3.8 27B)

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