LFM3-1.7B vs MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B

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.

MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B 70

Chat template 20, a Jinja file in the repository. Tool-calling format 10 of 25, the format is only in the template and the card names no tool parser. Trained tool calling 20, several calls a turn and agentic fine-tuning. Structured output 0, not documented. Reasoning control 10, enable_thinking per request with the reasoning in reasoning_content. Context 10, 262,144 tokens from the base's native length, though the card doesn't say.

LFM3-1.7B 67

Model card 17, Intended use (local agents, tool calling, structured outputs, fine-tuning), a limitation (not recommended for agentic coding or complex multi-step reasoning), architecture (24 layers: 13 gated short convolutions, 5 sliding-window and 6 global attention), parameters (1.73B), context (256K) and 16 languages. Training data 5, A general description: 22T tokens of pre-training in two stages with the kinds of data added since LFM2, 1.75T tokens of supervised fine-tuning, then mixed reinforcement learning, distillation from six specialist teachers and agentic reinforcement learning. Last change 20, the last commit, on 9 November 2026, added the OpenVINO checkpoint to the card's inference table, a day before this check. Responsiveness 10, Of the 22 discussions that aren't pull requests (27 October to 8 November 2026), 7 have a reply from a LiquidAI member, which is some. Version policy 5, LFM3 came out in new repositories and the LFM2.5 models stay in theirs. File health 10, Config, template and card agree on the lfm3 architecture, the 262,144-token context and the thinking switch. 17 + 5 + 20 + 10 + 5 + 10 = 67.

MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B 40

Model card 5 of 20, intended use and parameters only. Training data 5, a domain mix with token counts but no sources or cut-off. Last change 20, README updates on 28 October 2026. Responsiveness 0, Xiaomi answered none of the 14 discussions. Version policy 5, a first release. File health 5, no LICENSE file, a config that lists an MTP layer the weights lack, and template and tool-call reports waiting without a reply.

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.

MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B 65

File safety 25, safetensors only and no repository code runs. Provenance 15, the files are in Xiaomi's MiMo organisation, which mimo.xiaomi.com links to, with a checksum on every file. Safety evaluation 0, the technical report has no safety results. Agent guidance 5, the card's Use Restrictions section (28 October 2026) gives general cautions, with nothing on prompt injection, refusals or safeguards. Licence risk 15, MIT and Apache 2.0 with no conditions, and the card says its restrictions add none. Security programme 5 of 10, Xiaomi's company security centre takes reports, but nothing links it to MiMo and no advisories were found.

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.

MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B 80

Memory 30 of 30, Ollama's library build at q4_K_M is 6.6 GB, 7.9 GB with a fifth added, while Xiaomi's only build is BF16 at 18.85 GB. Runtimes 25, it keeps Qwen3.5-9B's architecture, which released vLLM, SGLang, Transformers and llama.cpp run, and Ollama's own library carries this model (entry updated 3 November 2026; the 21 October check found none). Builds 0, Xiaomi publishes no quantised build. Terms 15, MIT on the card over an Apache 2.0 base, both with nothing added. Download 10, not gated. Hosted 0, no provider serves this distill.