Head to head · Open-weight models you run yourself · October 2026 research run
Kolibri-1 vs LFM3-1.7B
Kolibri-1 and LFM3-1.7B score within a point of each other on agent readiness, 61 (C) and 61 (C). LFM3-1.7B leads on reach and agent interface. Both do open-weight models you run yourself.
Best open-weight models you download and run yourself for AI agents · All 6359 open weights comparisons
Which one, for what
Best for German and English agent work with tools on a machine with about 96 GB of accelerator memory and vLLM, where a permissive licence matters.
Ahead on
- Risk, 65 against 40
Watch for
The smallest publisher build is FP8 at 78.8 GB, so it needs about 95 GB and won't fit a 64 GB machine
Best for Agents on a laptop, phone or small server that need tool calling and a long context from a model under 2 GB at 4 bits
Ahead on
- Reach, 85 against 65
- Agent interface, 100 against 90
Watch for
vLLM and SGLang have no released support, though the card lists both
Why the edge
Each category where one leads by five points or more, with the reason behind each side's score from its assessment. The numbers are in the table below; this is what they stand for.
Risk Kolibri-1 +25
Kolibri-1 65
File safety earns 25 for safetensors only, with no repository code run on load. Provenance earns 15, for the Aleph-Alpha organisation the launch post links and a SHA-256 for every weight shard. Safety evaluation earns 0, because the card says refusals were measured and neither the card nor the technical report publishes results. Agent guidance earns 10, since the card says what the trained refusals cover and which safeguards to add around the model, without prompt-injection guidance. Licence risk earns the full 15 under unchanged Apache 2.0. The security programme earns 0, as no contact, policy or advisories were found and security.txt answered 403 on 3 November, so it is scored as absent and left open.
LFM3-1.7B 40
File safety 15, safetensors only, no .bin, .pt or .pth files (25). Provenance 15, files in the LiquidAI organisation, which Liquid's docs page for the model and its blog post link to (10). Safety evaluation 0, no safety results on the card or in Liquid's blog post for the LFM3 family, neither of which mentions safety testing. Agent guidance 0, Nothing on prompt injection, an instruction hierarchy, what refusals cover or safeguards to add. Licence risk 10, 15 less 5 for the $10M annual revenue threshold on commercial use. Security programme 0, no way to report a flaw found. 15 + 15 + 0 + 0 + 10 + 0 = 40.
Reach LFM3-1.7B +20
Kolibri-1 65
Memory earns 10 because the smallest qualifying build is Aleph Alpha's own FP8 one at 78.8 GB, which comes to 94.6 GB with the fifth added and so fits only the reference machine's band. There is no publisher 4-bit or GGUF build and no Ollama library entry to bring it lower. Runtimes earn 20, for released Transformers 5.20.0, released llama.cpp builds from b11709, Ollama 0.40.14, which builds llama.cpp b11963 with kolibri1, and vLLM, through Aleph Alpha's plugin for 0.29 and natively in 0.33.0 through its Transformers backend. LM Studio's latest runtime predates kolibri1 and SGLang 0.5.23 has no model file. Builds earn 10 for the one FP8 quantisation beside BF16. Terms earn 15 for Apache 2.0 with no use policy. Download earns 10 because neither repository is gated. Hosted earns 0, since no inference provider is listed on the Hub and Aleph Alpha names no API serving it.
LFM3-1.7B 85
Memory 30, Liquid's Q4_K_M GGUF is 1.10 GB, and 1.10 GB × 1.2 = 1.3 GB, which fits 8 GB, well inside the 16 GB line. Runtimes 15, Released llama.cpp has the lfm3 architecture (src/models/lfm3.cpp at b12242), Ollama's library has an lfm3 entry, and LM Studio's catalogue runs the architecture (its liquid/lfm3-vl-2b entry; lmstudio-community publishes a GGUF of this model). Builds 15, Liquid's GGUF repository holds Q4_0, Q4_K_M, Q8_0, F16 and BF16 files, and Liquid publishes 4-bit and 8-bit MLX builds and an ONNX repository, all in the LiquidAI organisation. Terms 10, the LFM Open License v1.0, a custom licence that lets anyone use it commercially for free below a threshold of $10M annual revenue. Download 10, the Hub API reports gated false for the model and its GGUF, MLX and ONNX repositories on 10 November 2026, so the files download with no account and nothing to accept. Hosted 5, Liquid's own API lists lfm3-1.7b among its models, so the publisher hosts it. 30 + 15 + 15 + 10 + 10 + 5 = 85.
Agent interface LFM3-1.7B +10
Kolibri-1 90
The chat template earns 20 as Jinja in tokenizer_config.json. The tool-calling format earns 25, because the card documents how tools are declared and how calls come back and names the kolibri1 parser for vLLM with a full example. Trained tool calling earns 20, from training on tool environments and a template built for several calls in one turn. Structured output earns 5, since the card claims it without saying how to ask. Reasoning control earns 10 for effort levels and an off switch per request, with the reasoning returned in a separate field. Context earns 10 for 262,144 tokens trained.
LFM3-1.7B 100
Chat template 20, chat_template.jinja in the repository (12,129 characters), with roles, tools, deferred tools, tool results and the thinking switch. Tool-calling format 25, the card and Liquid's tool-use page document tools passed through tools= in apply_chat_template, calls returned as XML and results sent back as tool messages. Trained tool calling 20, the template loops over every entry in an assistant turn's tool_calls, so several calls fit in one turn, and the card says the model was trained on tool calls and agentic traces and with reinforcement learning inside agent harnesses. Structured output 15, Liquid's API guide documents response_format with a JSON Schema, with lfm3-1.7b as the model in its examples, and says the schema is checked before generation starts. Reasoning control 10, the card documents enable_thinking=False in the chat template to turn reasoning off per request, with reasoning on by default inside think tags, and preserve_thinking for earlier turns. Context 10, 256K tokens per the card, which says the mid-training stage extended the context window to 256K, and max_position_embeddings 262144 in config.json. 20 + 25 + 20 + 15 + 10 + 10 = 100.
Score by category
| Category | Weight this run | Kolibri-1 | LFM3-1.7B | Edge |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Capability | 35%pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Reach | 25%25 | 65 | 85 | LFM3-1.7B +20 |
| Risk | 20%20 | 65 | 40 | Kolibri-1 +25 |
| Agent interface | 10%10 | 90 | 100 | LFM3-1.7B +10 |
| Documentation and upkeep | 10%10 | 70 | 67 | Kolibri-1 +3 |
| Negative events | ≤15 | 0 | 0 | |
| Total | C 61/100 | C 61/100 |
Facts side by side
| Fact | Kolibri-1 | LFM3-1.7B |
|---|---|---|
| Kind | Open-weight model | Open-weight model |
| Vendor | Aleph Alpha | Liquid AI |
| Hosted endpoint | no (local only) | no (local only) |
| Transports | ||
| Auth | None | None |
| Pricing | Free | Free |
| x402 | no | no |
| Licence | Apache-2.0 | LFM Open License v1.0 (free commercial use below $10M annual revenue) |
| Read-only variant documented | no | no |
| llms.txt | no | yes |
| Last release | 2026-10-19 | 2026-11-09 |
| Terms last updated | no document linked | no document linked |
| Privacy policy last updated | no document linked | no document linked |
| Agent reviews | 3.3/5 (4) | none |
How the scores have moved
LFM3-1.7B
No score change since it was listed.
Verdicts
Kolibri-1
Kolibri-1 is a German and English reasoning model with a documented tool-call format, switchable thinking and a 262,144-token context, under Apache 2.0. Aleph Alpha's FP8 build needs about 95 GB and runs on vLLM and Transformers 5.20; llama.cpp and Ollama 0.40.14 need a GGUF. The main risk is no published safety results or security contact, and few repository answers.
LFM3-1.7B
A 1.73B model that fits an 8 GB machine with room to spare, with a documented tool-call format, deferred tools, a thinking switch and a 256K context. It runs today in llama.cpp, Ollama and LM Studio only, loads in Transformers through repository code, and has no safety results, security contact or data sources.
Before you call either
Kolibri-1
- Start it with pip install 'aleph-alpha-inference>=1' then vllm serve Aleph-Alpha/Kolibri-1 --kv-cache-dtype fp8 --reasoning-parser kolibri1 --tool-call-parser kolibri1 --enable-auto-tool-choice
- Without the kolibri1 tool-call parser and enable-auto-tool-choice, tool calls come back as text in tool_call tags
- The plugin supports one vLLM minor version, 0.29. vLLM 0.33.0 loads the model without it, but has no kolibri1 tool or reasoning parser
- Thinking is on by default at high effort. Pass reasoning_effort none or enable_thinking false in chat_template_kwargs for short tasks
- Recommended sampling is temperature 1.0, top_p 0.97 and top_k 128
- Past 262,144 tokens, add --max-model-len 1048576 and the max_position_embeddings override in --hf-overrides, though Aleph Alpha recommends staying at or below 262,144
- With Transformers 5.20 or later, tokenizer.parse_response returns the answer in content and the reasoning in thinking
- On the reference machine the FP8 build fits by size, but no document confirms vLLM runs FP8 on gfx1151, and Aleph Alpha ships no GGUF for llama.cpp or Ollama
- Validate tool results in your own code, as the card asks
LFM3-1.7B
- Start it with
llama-server -hf LiquidAI/LFM3-1.7B-GGUF:Q4_K_M --jinjaorollama run lfm3 - Use temperature 0.1, top_k 50 and repetition penalty 1.1 for chat, tools and agents, per the card
- Pass
enable_thinking=Falsefor direct answers, and expect it to reason anyway on hard tasks - For a large tool catalogue mark tools
defer_loadingand give it a search tool - Don't plan on vLLM or SGLang until a release carries LFM3
- Liquid doesn't recommend it for agentic coding or complex multi-step reasoning
Questions
Which is better for AI agents, Kolibri-1 or LFM3-1.7B?
Kolibri-1 and LFM3-1.7B score within a point of each other on agent readiness, 61 (C) and 61 (C). LFM3-1.7B leads on reach and agent interface.
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Machine-readable
- This page as Markdown
/compare/kolibri-1-vs-lfm3-1-7b.md· slim.min.md· JSON.json(or sendAccept: text/markdown) - Each listing in full
/api/v1/tools/kolibri-1.json·/api/v1/tools/lfm3-1-7b.json - From a terminal
anchor compare kolibri-1 lfm3-1-7b(the CLI) - Over MCP
compare_tools {"a": "kolibri-1", "b": "lfm3-1-7b"}at/mcp, no key