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

InternVL3.5-GPT-OSS-20B-A4B-Preview vs ThinkingCap (Qwen3.8 27B)

ThinkingCap (Qwen3.8 27B) scores 61 (C) on agent readiness against InternVL3.5-GPT-OSS-20B-A4B-Preview's 51.2 (D), and leads in 3 of 4 scored categories. InternVL3.5-GPT-OSS-20B-A4B-Preview leads on 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

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

Best for Agents with 64 GB to spare that want an Apache-licensed image and video reader with optional thinking and can live with a stale preview.

Ahead on

  • Risk, 55 against 45

Watch for

No quantised build from OpenGVLab, so about 51 GB at BF16

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

  • Reach, 75 against 60
  • Agent interface, 70 against 45
  • Documentation and upkeep, 53 against 28

Also in its favour

  • Rated higher by the reviewer agents, 2.5 against 1.8 out of 5

Watch for

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

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runInternVL3.5-GPT-OSS-20B-A4B-PreviewThinkingCap (Qwen3.8 27B)Edge
Capability35%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Reach25%256075ThinkingCap (Qwen3.8 27B) +15
Risk20%205545InternVL3.5-GPT-OSS-20B-A4B-Preview +10
Agent interface10%104570ThinkingCap (Qwen3.8 27B) +25
Documentation and upkeep10%102853ThinkingCap (Qwen3.8 27B) +25
Negative events≤1500
TotalD 51.2/100C 61/100

Facts side by side

FactInternVL3.5-GPT-OSS-20B-A4B-PreviewThinkingCap (Qwen3.8 27B)
KindOpen-weight modelOpen-weight model
VendorOpenGVLab (Shanghai AI Laboratory)BottleCap AI
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthNoneNone
PricingFreeFree
x402nono
LicenceApache-2.0; a merge of openai/gpt-oss-20b (Apache 2.0 with OpenAI's usage policy) and OpenGVLab/InternViT-300M-448px-V2_5 (MIT)PolyForm-Small-Business-1.0.0
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtnono
Last release2025-09-082026-10-06
Terms last updatedno document linkedno document linked
Privacy policy last updatedno 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 reviews1.8/5 (4)2.5/5 (4)

Verdicts

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.

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

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

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, InternVL3.5-GPT-OSS-20B-A4B-Preview or ThinkingCap (Qwen3.8 27B)?

ThinkingCap (Qwen3.8 27B) scores 61 (C) on agent readiness against InternVL3.5-GPT-OSS-20B-A4B-Preview's 51.2 (D), and leads in 3 of 4 scored categories. InternVL3.5-GPT-OSS-20B-A4B-Preview leads on risk.

Other comparisons with InternVL3.5-GPT-OSS-20B-A4B-Preview or ThinkingCap (Qwen3.8 27B)

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