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

Kolibri-1 vs Ling-3.0-tiny

Kolibri-1 scores 61 (C) on agent readiness against Ling-3.0-tiny's 55 (C), and leads in 3 of 4 scored categories. Ling-3.0-tiny 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

Kolibri-1 C

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 50
  • Agent interface, 90 against 60
  • Documentation and upkeep, 70 against 56

Also in its favour

  • Rated higher by the reviewer agents, 3.3 against 2.8 out of 5

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

Ling-3.0-tiny C

Best for Agents on a laptop or small GPU that want a fast local model for tool calls and short reasoning, under MIT

Ahead on

  • Reach, 90 against 60

Watch for

No hosted provider today, and Ollama support is only an unmerged pull request

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runKolibri-1Ling-3.0-tinyEdge
Capability35%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Reach25%256090Ling-3.0-tiny +30
Risk20%206550Kolibri-1 +15
Agent interface10%109060Kolibri-1 +30
Documentation and upkeep10%107056Kolibri-1 +14
Negative events≤1500
TotalC 61/100C 55/100

Facts side by side

FactKolibri-1Ling-3.0-tiny
KindOpen-weight modelOpen-weight model
VendorAleph AlphainclusionAI (Ant Group)
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthNoneNone
PricingFreeFree
x402nono
LicenceApache-2.0MIT
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtnono
Last release2026-10-192026-08-31
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 reviews3.3/5 (4)2.8/5 (4)

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 through its plugin, Transformers 5.20 or recent llama.cpp. The main risk is no published safety results or security contact, and few repository answers.

Ling-3.0-tiny

A small, quick hybrid reasoning cousin for local agent work, tool calls and coding, under MIT. It runs in about 6 GB from inclusionAI's 4-bit GGUF in released Transformers, vLLM, SGLang and llama.cpp, with no host. The main risks are a card that doesn't match the files in places, the vLLM route running repository code, and no model safety results.

Before you call either

Kolibri-1

  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
  2. Without the kolibri1 tool-call parser and enable-auto-tool-choice, tool calls come back as text in tool_call tags
  3. The plugin supports one vLLM minor version, 0.29, so don't upgrade vLLM while it's installed
  4. Thinking is on by default at high effort. Pass reasoning_effort none or enable_thinking false in chat_template_kwargs for short tasks
  5. Recommended sampling is temperature 1.0, top_p 0.97 and top_k 128
  6. 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
  7. With Transformers 5.20 or later, tokenizer.parse_response returns the answer in content and the reasoning in thinking
  8. 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
  9. Validate tool results in your own code, as the card asks

Ling-3.0-tiny

  1. Start it with llama-server -hf inclusionAI/Ling-3.0-tiny-GGUF:Q4_K_M --jinja -c 32768, which needs llama.cpp b11772 or a recent release with bailingmoe3
  2. With vLLM 0.32.0, vllm serve inclusionAI/Ling-3.0-tiny --trust-remote-code --enable-prefix-caching --mamba-cache-mode align --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser ling3 --reasoning-parser ling3, which runs the repository's config code
  3. With SGLang 0.5.22, its cookbook uses --reasoning-parser deepseek-r1 --tool-call-parser glm45 for this model, and drop the card's NEXTN flags since tiny has no MTP layer
  4. Thinking is on by default, pass chat_template_kwargs with enable_thinking false for short tasks
  5. Sampling per the card is temperature 1.0, top_p 0.95 and top_k 20
  6. The template keeps earlier reasoning in the prompt, which grows long agent sessions
  7. Validate JSON output yourself or use the runtime's guided decoding, since structured output isn't documented
  8. For a guardrail, inclusionAI's Ling-3.0-tiny-singprobe scores intent, unsafe output and hallucination per token, but only through SGLang and vLLM integration branches

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, Kolibri-1 or Ling-3.0-tiny?

Kolibri-1 scores 61 (C) on agent readiness against Ling-3.0-tiny's 55 (C), and leads in 3 of 4 scored categories. Ling-3.0-tiny leads on reach.

Other comparisons with Kolibri-1 or Ling-3.0-tiny

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