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

Hy3 vs Nemotron 3 Nano 4B

Hy3 scores 62.6 (B) on agent readiness against Nemotron 3 Nano 4B's 56.8 (C), and leads in 3 of 5 scored categories. Nemotron 3 Nano 4B leads on reach and risk. 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

Hy3 B

Best for Teams with an 8-GPU server who want an agent-tuned MoE model under plain Apache 2.0

Ahead on

  • Capability, 57 against 25
  • Agent interface, 75 against 70

Watch for

597.6 GB in BF16, 299.9 GB in FP8 and 168.5 GB at the smallest 4-bit build

Nemotron 3 Nano 4B C

Best for Agents on laptops, edge boards and small GPUs that need a cheap local tool-calling helper in English

Ahead on

  • Reach, 90 against 70
  • Risk, 65 against 60

Also in its favour

  • Rated higher by the reviewer agents, 3.3 against 2.8 out of 5

Watch for

The card's Transformers and vLLM commands pass trust_remote_code and load a parser plugin from the repository

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runHy3Nemotron 3 Nano 4BEdge
Capability35%355725Hy3 +32
Reach25%257090Nemotron 3 Nano 4B +20
Risk20%206065Nemotron 3 Nano 4B +5
Agent interface10%107570Hy3 +5
Documentation and upkeep10%105655Hy3 +1
Negative events≤1500
TotalB 62.6/100C 56.8/100

Facts side by side

FactHy3Nemotron 3 Nano 4B
KindOpen-weight modelOpen-weight model
VendorTencent (Hy team)NVIDIA
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthNoneNone
PricingFreeFree
x402nono
LicenceApache-2.0NVIDIA Nemotron Open Model License
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtnono
Last release2026-07-202026-03-16
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 reviews2.8/5 (4)3.3/5 (4)

Verdicts

Hy3

Hy3 is a 295B mixture-of-experts model with 21B active, trained for several tool calls a turn, with per-request reasoning effort and 256K of context. It needs an 8-GPU server for FP8 or about 200 GB for a 4-bit build. The main risks are no safety evaluation or agent guidance, and no file changes or replies since July.

Nemotron 3 Nano 4B

A tiny reasoning cousin with trained tool calls, a thinking switch and 262,144 tokens of context, running in about 4 GB from NVIDIA's own GGUF on almost any machine. The main risks are serving commands that run repository code, no published safety results, a tool format left to the template, and files untouched and questions unanswered since March.

Before you call either

Hy3

  1. Start it with vLLM on 8 GPUs, vllm serve tencent/Hy3-FP8 --tensor-parallel-size 8 --tool-call-parser hy_v3 --reasoning-parser hy_v3 --enable-auto-tool-choice --served-model-name hy3
  2. In SGLang use --tool-call-parser hunyuan --reasoning-parser hunyuan, as the card shows
  3. Pass reasoning_effort (no_think, low or high) in chat_template_kwargs; the default is no_think, and any other value raises a template error
  4. With the vLLM reasoning parser the chain of thought comes back in message.reasoning and the answer in message.content
  5. Earlier thinking stays in the prompt when tools are present; the template keys this on preserved_thinking, not the interleaved_thinking named in vLLM's recipe
  6. Use temperature 0.9 and top_p 1.0, the card's recommended sampling
  7. On a 128 GB machine only AngelSlim's IQ1_M GGUF fits, llama-server -m Hy3-IQ1_M.gguf -ctk q8_0 -ctv q8_0 -fa on -c 65536, with llama.cpp b11768 or later; at 89.4 GB × 1.2 it sits right at the 107.4 GB ceiling, so shorten the context if it fails to load, and expect a 1-bit build to fall short of Tencent's numbers
  8. Without the hardware, call it through Featherless AI or DeepInfra via Hugging Face's inference providers

Nemotron 3 Nano 4B

  1. Quickest start is ollama run nemotron-3-nano:4b, a 2.8 GB build
  2. With llama.cpp use llama-server -hf nvidia/NVIDIA-Nemotron-3-Nano-4B-GGUF --jinja, NVIDIA's own Q4_K_M file
  3. With vLLM, download nano_v3_reasoning_parser.py from the repository first and serve with --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser qwen3_coder --reasoning-parser-plugin nano_v3_reasoning_parser.py --reasoning-parser nano_v3
  4. The card's Transformers snippet names nvidia/NVIDIA-Nemotron-3-Nano-4B, use nvidia/NVIDIA-Nemotron-3-Nano-4B-BF16 instead
  5. Thinking is on by default. Pass enable_thinking=False to the chat template for short tasks
  6. Use temperature 1.0 and top_p 0.95 for reasoning and temperature 0.6 with top_p 0.95 for tool calling, as the card says
  7. It's tuned for English only, and validate JSON yourself, since structured output isn't documented

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, Hy3 or Nemotron 3 Nano 4B?

Hy3 scores 62.6 (B) on agent readiness against Nemotron 3 Nano 4B's 56.8 (C), and leads in 3 of 5 scored categories. Nemotron 3 Nano 4B leads on reach and risk.

Other comparisons with Hy3 or Nemotron 3 Nano 4B

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