LFM3-1.7B vs MiniCPM-o 4.5

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.

MiniCPM-o 4.5 35

Chat template 20, a Jinja template in the tokenizer config. Tool-calling format 10 of 25, only the inherited Qwen3 template says how tools work. Trained tool calling 0, OpenBMB never mentions tool use. Structured output 0, not documented. Reasoning control 0, thinking turns on and off per request but nobody says where the reasoning comes back. Context 5, 40,960 tokens. Read as an omni model, it takes images, video and audio and returns text and streaming speech, which the card documents with code.

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.

MiniCPM-o 4.5 90

Memory 30, OpenBMB's 4-bit GGUF with its vision file is 5.9 GB, about 7 GB with a fifth added. Runtimes 15 of 25, released vLLM, llama.cpp and Ollama run it, while Transformers 5.22.1 still needs OpenBMB's remote code and SGLang 0.5.23 supports only the older 2.6. Builds 15, GGUF at several precisions plus AWQ and GPTQ. Terms 15, plain Apache 2.0. Download 10, nothing gated. Hosted 5, OpenBMB's own API serves it.