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

Hy3 vs Qwen3.5-2B

Hy3 scores 62.6 (B) on agent readiness against Qwen3.5-2B's 50.5 (D), and leads in 4 of 5 scored categories. Qwen3.5-2B leads on reach. 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 28
  • Risk, 60 against 55
  • Agent interface, 75 against 60
  • Documentation and upkeep, 56 against 37

Watch for

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

Qwen3.5-2B D

Best for Builders who want a cheap local helper or fine-tuning base for narrow tasks and image reading on a laptop, small GPU or CPU

Ahead on

  • Reach, 80 against 70

Watch for

No quantised build from Alibaba, and only one inference provider

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runHy3Qwen3.5-2BEdge
Capability35%355728Hy3 +29
Reach25%257080Qwen3.5-2B +10
Risk20%206055Hy3 +5
Agent interface10%107560Hy3 +15
Documentation and upkeep10%105637Hy3 +19
Negative events≤1500
TotalB 62.6/100D 50.5/100

Facts side by side

FactHy3Qwen3.5-2B
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 release2026-07-202026-03-02
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)3/5 (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.

Qwen3.5-2B

A small vision-language cousin for prototypes, fine-tuning and light local steps such as tool calls, tagging or reading an image, running in about 2 GB at 4 bits in every major runtime under plain Apache 2.0. Keep thinking off, since the card warns it loops. The main risk is neglect, with no safety results or answers from Alibaba 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

Qwen3.5-2B

  1. Smallest start is ollama run qwen3.5:2b-q4_K_M (1.9 GB); plain qwen3.5:2b pulls the 2.7 GB Q8_0 build
  2. Full precision vllm serve Qwen/Qwen3.5-2B --port 8000 --max-model-len 262144 --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser qwen3_coder
  3. Thinking is off by default; if you turn it on with "chat_template_kwargs": {"enable_thinking": true}, stream and cut off runaway output, since the card warns of thinking loops, and add --reasoning-parser qwen3 in vLLM or SGLang to split the reasoning out
  4. There's no generation_config.json, so pass the card's sampling yourself, for example temperature=1.0, top_p=1.0, top_k=20, presence_penalty=2.0 for text without thinking
  5. Use it for narrow steps or as a fine-tuning base, not as the main agent, as the card itself suggests
  6. Validate any JSON it returns, since structured output isn't documented

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, Hy3 or Qwen3.5-2B?

Hy3 scores 62.6 (B) on agent readiness against Qwen3.5-2B's 50.5 (D), and leads in 4 of 5 scored categories. Qwen3.5-2B leads on reach.

Other comparisons with Hy3 or Qwen3.5-2B

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