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

Hy3 vs Qwen3.5-9B

Hy3 scores 62.6 (B) on agent readiness against Qwen3.5-9B's 60.5 (C), and leads in 4 of 5 scored categories. Qwen3.5-9B 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 51
  • Risk, 60 against 55
  • Agent interface, 75 against 70
  • Documentation and upkeep, 56 against 34

Watch for

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

Qwen3.5-9B C

Best for Agents that want a small multimodal tool-calling cousin on a laptop or a 16 GB GPU, under a plain licence

Ahead on

  • Reach, 85 against 70

Watch for

No quantised build from Qwen itself

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runHy3Qwen3.5-9BEdge
Capability35%355751Hy3 +6
Reach25%257085Qwen3.5-9B +15
Risk20%206055Hy3 +5
Agent interface10%107570Hy3 +5
Documentation and upkeep10%105634Hy3 +22
Negative events≤1500
TotalB 62.6/100C 60.5/100

Facts side by side

FactHy3Qwen3.5-9B
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)2.5/5 (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.

Qwen3.5-9B

A small dense vision-language cousin with trained tool calling, switchable thinking and a 262,144-token context, for local agent subtasks. Ollama's 4-bit build needs about 8 GB and the BF16 files about 24 GB, in every major runtime. The main risk is neglect, with no file changes since March, no replies from Qwen to reports and no safety results.

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

Qwen3.5-9B

  1. Smallest start is ollama run qwen3.5:9b (6.6 GB, q4_k_m)
  2. On vLLM run vllm serve Qwen/Qwen3.5-9B --port 8000 --max-model-len 262144 --reasoning-parser qwen3 --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser qwen3_coder, or tool calls come back as text
  3. Tool calls use the XML style <tool_call><function=name><parameter=x>, not Hermes JSON, so use the qwen3_coder parser and not hermes
  4. Thinking is on by default; pass chat_template_kwargs with enable_thinking false for short tasks, since /nothink isn't supported
  5. There's no generation_config.json, so pass sampling yourself, temperature 1.0, top_p 0.95, top_k 20, presence_penalty 1.5 when thinking, or 0.7, 0.8, 20, 1.5 without
  6. Keep at least 128K of context when thinking, and turn on YaRN only beyond 262,144 tokens
  7. Validate JSON output yourself or use the runtime's guided decoding

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, Hy3 or Qwen3.5-9B?

Hy3 scores 62.6 (B) on agent readiness against Qwen3.5-9B's 60.5 (C), and leads in 4 of 5 scored categories. Qwen3.5-9B leads on reach.

Other comparisons with Hy3 or Qwen3.5-9B

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