InternVL3.5-GPT-OSS-20B-A4B-Preview vs Nemotron 3.5 Lightning 30B A3B

InternVL3.5-GPT-OSS-20B-A4B-Preview

An image and video reader on gpt-oss-20b with an optional thinking mode, a preview untouched for over a year. It needs about 51 GB in BF16, since OpenGVLab publishes no quantised build, and runs in Transformers and vLLM. The main risk is a chat template in the Transformers-format repository that doesn't match its tokenizer, with no safety results.

Nemotron 3.5 Lightning 30B A3B

A small agent cousin, 3B active parameters, with trained parallel tool calls, a thinking switch and up to 1M tokens of context, under a permissive licence. It runs in about 23 GB from the GGUF or Ollama builds, and NVIDIA's NVFP4 build needs NVIDIA GPUs. The main risks are no published safety results and one answered question across two repositories.

InternVL3.5-GPT-OSS-20B-A4B-Preview

1. Serve with vllm serve OpenGVLab/InternVL3_5-GPT-OSS-20B-A4B-Preview-HF --max-model-len 32768, which is our command; the card gives none for vLLM
2. Check the rendered prompt before relying on it, since the shipped template's <|im_start|> markers aren't tokens in the gpt-oss tokenizer; the GitHub-format repository's harmony template is the alternative
3. Use Transformers 4.55.0 or later, as the card requires for this size
4. For thinking, send the card's thinking system prompt and parse the reasoning out of the <think> tags, with temperature 0.6 and sampling on as the card advises
5. Keep inputs within 32K tokens, the length it was trained at, whatever the config says

Nemotron 3.5 Lightning 30B A3B

1. Quickest start is ollama run nemotron-3.5-lightning, about 19 to 25 GB of files depending on the platform
2. On the reference machine use llama-server -hf ggml-org/NVIDIA-Nemotron-3.5-Lightning-30B-A3B-GGUF:Q4_0 --jinja, since the card's Q4_K_M tag doesn't exist there and NVFP4 needs NVIDIA GPUs
3. With vLLM serve it with --reasoning-parser nemotron_v3 --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser qwen3_coder (SGLang uses --reasoning-parser nemotron_3)
4. Use temperature=1.0 and top_p=0.95, as the card says
5. Thinking is on by default. Pass chat_template_kwargs with enable_thinking false for short tasks
6. For coding agents pass force_nonempty_content: true in chat_template_kwargs, which vLLM's nemotron_v3 parser reads so a cut-off reasoning trace still returns content
7. Go past 262,144 tokens only with the card's flags (VLLM_ALLOW_LONG_MAX_MODEL_LEN=1, --max-model-len 1048576) and enough memory