LFM2.5-2.6B vs Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B-Instruct

LFM2.5-2.6B

A small, fast cousin for tool calls, extraction and long-context steps on a laptop or phone. Liquid's own 4-bit build is 1.6 GB, and every common runtime runs it. It always thinks, isn't meant for coding or knowledge-heavy work, and organisations over $10M of revenue need another licence. There are no safety results or security contact.

Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B-Instruct

A mid-sized vision-language cousin for screenshots, documents, charts and video that runs fast for its size, with about 3B active parameters. It needs about 23 GB for Alibaba's Q4_K_M GGUF with its vision file, loads in every major runtime under plain Apache 2.0, and three providers host it. With no published safety work, add guardrails before it drives a GUI.

LFM2.5-2.6B

1. Quickest start is ollama run LiquidAI/lfm2.5-2.6b, 1.7 GB, or llama-cli -hf LiquidAI/LFM2.5-2.6B-GGUF
2. With vLLM or SGLang pass --tool-call-parser lfm2; for vLLM add --reasoning-parser qwen3 so the thinking comes back separately
3. Sample at temperature 0.1, top_k 50 and repetition_penalty 1.1, as the card and generation_config.json set
4. Put tools in the system prompt as List of tools: [...] JSON, or pass tools to apply_chat_template; calls come back as a Python list of function calls, and the system prompt can ask for JSON calls instead
5. Leave max_tokens unset or generous, since a low cap cuts the reasoning off mid-thought
6. Earlier thinking is dropped from the prompt unless preserve_thinking is true
7. Liquid's 328M LFM2.5-2.6B-DSpark drafter speeds decoding about 2.6 times in SGLang and on Apple silicon, per Liquid
8. Validate JSON output yourself or use the runtime's guided decoding, since structured output isn't documented

Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B-Instruct

1. Start it with llama-server -hf Qwen/Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B-Instruct-GGUF:Q4_K_M --jinja -c 32768, or ollama run qwen3-vl:30b-a3b-instruct
2. In Ollama the plain qwen3-vl:30b tag is the Thinking edition, so name 30b-a3b-instruct
3. With the GGUF, load the mmproj vision file too, or images won't be read
4. Parse tool calls as JSON inside <tool_call> tags, or use SGLang's --tool-call-parser qwen
5. Use the shipped sampling, temperature 0.7, top_p 0.8 and top_k 20, from generation_config.json
6. Validate JSON output yourself, since structured output isn't documented
7. vLLM needs 0.11.0 or later, Transformers 4.57.0 or later and llama.cpp b6907 or later