Kolibri-1 vs Nemotron 3 Nano 30B A3B

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.

Nemotron 3 Nano 30B A3B

A fast hybrid Mamba-Transformer cousin with 3.5B active parameters for reasoning and tool calling over very long inputs, in every major local runtime. A 4-bit build needs about 22 to 23 GB. The main risks are that NVIDIA's documented vLLM path runs repository code, no safety results are published and NVIDIA hasn't answered reports since March.

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

Nemotron 3 Nano 30B A3B

1. Start it with ollama run nemotron-3-nano:30b (18 GB MLX on a Mac, 24 GB q4_K_M elsewhere)
2. On the reference machine use BF16 with vLLM, after wget https://huggingface.co/nvidia/NVIDIA-Nemotron-3-Nano-30B-A3B-BF16/resolve/main/nano_v3_reasoning_parser.py, then vllm serve nvidia/NVIDIA-Nemotron-3-Nano-30B-A3B-BF16 --max-model-len 262144 --trust-remote-code --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser qwen3_coder --reasoning-parser-plugin nano_v3_reasoning_parser.py --reasoning-parser nano_v3
3. NVFP4 needs an NVIDIA Blackwell GPU, and FP8 isn't documented on gfx1151
4. Without the qwen3_coder tool parser and the nano_v3 reasoning parser, tool calls and reasoning come back as plain text
5. Card sampling is temperature 0.6 and top_p 0.95 for tool calling, temperature 1.0 and top_p 1.0 for reasoning
6. Thinking is on by default, so pass enable_thinking as false in chat_template_kwargs for short tasks
7. Set VLLM_ALLOW_LONG_MAX_MODEL_LEN=1 and raise --max-model-len only when you need more than 262,144 tokens
8. In SGLang the main branch names the reasoning parser nemotron_3, not the card's nano_v3
9. Filter untrusted tool results before they reach the model, as NVIDIA warns prompt injection can lead to code execution
10. Validate JSON output yourself or use the runtime's guided decoding, since none is documented for the model