Head to head · Open-weight models you run yourself · October 2026 research run
LFM3-Omni-2B vs LFM3-VL-2B
LFM3-Omni-2B and LFM3-VL-2B score within a point of each other on agent readiness, 61 (C) and 61 (C). LFM3-VL-2B leads on reach, agent interface and documentation and upkeep. Both do open-weight models you run yourself.
Best open-weight models you download and run yourself for AI agents · All 4969 open weights comparisons
Which one, for what
Best for Voice and camera agents on a laptop or phone that want one small model for hearing, seeing, speaking and calling tools
No category where it leads by five points or more, and no fact that sets it apart.
Watch for
Only llama.cpp and Ollama run it in a release
Best for Agents on a laptop, phone or robot that need to read screens, documents, images and video from a model under 2 GB at 4 bits
Ahead on
- Reach, 85 against 80
- Agent interface, 90 against 70
- Documentation and upkeep, 77 against 49
Watch for
vLLM and SGLang support is unreleased, which the card says itself
Why the edge
Each category where one leads by five points or more, with the reason behind each side's score from its assessment. The numbers are in the table below; this is what they stand for.
Documentation and upkeep LFM3-VL-2B +28
LFM3-Omni-2B 49
Model card 14, Intended use (one on-device model in place of separate speech recognition, vision, language and speech models), architecture, parameters (2.17B), context (32K) and the text and speech languages. Training data 5, the card has no training section. Last change 20, the last commit, on 3 November 2026, changed the card's navigation icons, seven days before this check, and the one before it, on 28 October, documented video frame rate and frame limits. Responsiveness 0, none of the 12 discussions that aren't pull requests (27 October to 9 November 2026) has a reply from a LiquidAI member. Version policy 5, LFM3 came out in new repositories and the LFM2.5 models stay in theirs. File health 5, the card gives a 32K context while config.json gives the language model 128,000 positions and Liquid's API lists 128,000 for the hosted model, so the card and the files don't agree on context. 14 + 5 + 20 + 0 + 5 + 5 = 49.
LFM3-VL-2B 77
Model card 17, Intended use (questions about video, documents, charts and app screens, finding objects, spatial reasoning), a limitation (not recommended for coding, multi-turn conversations or complex reasoning), architecture (language model, 14-layer vision encoder and projector), parameters (1.92B), context (128K) and 16 languages. Training data 5, A general description: the base's 22T tokens of pre-training with the kinds of data added since LFM2, then vision mid-training on image and video data, supervised fine-tuning, vision reinforcement learning and distillation. 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 20, Of the 5 discussions that aren't pull requests (27 to 31 October 2026), 3 have a reply from a LiquidAI member, which is most. 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_vl architecture, the 128,000-token context and the vision settings in processor_config.json. 17 + 5 + 20 + 20 + 5 + 10 = 77.
Agent interface LFM3-VL-2B +20
LFM3-Omni-2B 70
Chat template 20, chat_template.jinja in the repository (13,513 characters), with roles, images, video and audio, tools, deferred tools and tool results. 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 documents tool calling from spoken or written requests. Structured output 0, the card doesn't mention JSON or structured output for this model. Reasoning control 0, the card says this is a non-reasoning model and that enable_thinking=True is not supported, so there is no thinking to turn off or budget. Context 5, 32K tokens of input and output per the card. 20 + 25 + 20 + 0 + 0 + 5 = 70.
LFM3-VL-2B 90
Chat template 20, chat_template.jinja in the repository (12,129 characters), with roles, images and video, 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 its fine-tuning mix included tool calling and agentic traces. Structured output 5, the card's vLLM and SGLang commands set a structured-output backend and its fine-tuning table has a JSON extraction notebook, but nothing says how to ask this model for JSON. Liquid's API guide documents response_format with lfm3-1.7b as its example. Reasoning control 10, Liquid's chat-template page documents enable_thinking=False in apply_chat_template for LFM3, with reasoning on by default inside think tags, and the card documents preserve_thinking and reports a no-thinking configuration in its benchmarks. Context 10, 128K tokens of input and output per the card, and max_position_embeddings 128000 for the language model in config.json. 20 + 25 + 20 + 5 + 10 + 10 = 90.
Reach LFM3-VL-2B +5
LFM3-Omni-2B 80
Memory 30, Liquid's Q4_K_M GGUF is 1.10 GB with its 0.29 GB projector file, and 1.39 GB × 1.2 = 1.7 GB, which fits 8 GB, well inside the 16 GB line. Runtimes 10, Released llama.cpp has the lfm3 architecture with the LFM3 vision and audio projectors and speech output (src/models/lfm3.cpp and tools/mtmd at b12242, with a realtime client example), and Ollama's library has an lfm3-omni entry. 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-omni-2b among its models, so the publisher hosts it. 30 + 10 + 15 + 10 + 10 + 5 = 80.
LFM3-VL-2B 85
Memory 30, Liquid's Q4_K_M GGUF is 1.10 GB with its 0.20 GB projector file, and 1.30 GB × 1.2 = 1.6 GB, which fits 8 GB, well inside the 16 GB line. Runtimes 15, Released llama.cpp has the lfm3 architecture and the LFM3-VL projector (src/models/lfm3.cpp and tools/mtmd at b12242), Ollama's library has an lfm3-vl entry, and LM Studio's catalogue lists liquid/lfm3-vl-2b. 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-vl-2b among its models, so the publisher hosts it. 30 + 15 + 15 + 10 + 10 + 5 = 85.
Score by category
| Category | Weight this run | LFM3-Omni-2B | LFM3-VL-2B | Edge |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Capability | 35%pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Reach | 25%25 | 80 | 85 | LFM3-VL-2B +5 |
| Risk | 20%20 | 40 | 40 | even |
| Agent interface | 10%10 | 70 | 90 | LFM3-VL-2B +20 |
| Documentation and upkeep | 10%10 | 49 | 77 | LFM3-VL-2B +28 |
| Negative events | ≤15 | 0 | 0 | |
| Total | C 61/100 | C 61/100 |
Facts side by side
| Fact | LFM3-Omni-2B | LFM3-VL-2B |
|---|---|---|
| Kind | Open-weight model | Open-weight model |
| Vendor | Liquid AI | Liquid AI |
| Hosted endpoint | no (local only) | no (local only) |
| Transports | ||
| Auth | None | None |
| Pricing | Free | Free |
| x402 | no | no |
| Licence | LFM Open License v1.0 (free commercial use below $10M annual revenue) | LFM Open License v1.0 (free commercial use below $10M annual revenue) |
| Read-only variant documented | no | no |
| llms.txt | yes | yes |
| Last release | 2026-11-03 | 2026-11-09 |
| Terms last updated | no document linked | no document linked |
| Privacy policy last updated | no document linked | no document linked |
Verdicts
LFM3-Omni-2B
One 2.17B model that sees, listens and talks on an 8 GB machine and turns spoken requests into tool calls. Only llama.cpp and Ollama run it in a release. The context is 32K, it doesn't reason, Liquid hasn't answered a question on the repository, and there are no safety results or data sources.
LFM3-VL-2B
A 1.92B vision model that reads images and video on an 8 GB machine, with a documented tool-call format and thinking. It runs today in llama.cpp, Ollama and LM Studio, while vLLM and SGLang support is still unreleased. Transformers needs repository code, and there are no safety results, security contact or data sources.
Before you call either
LFM3-Omni-2B
- Start it with
llama-server -hf LiquidAI/LFM3-Omni-2B-GGUF:Q4_K_M --jinjaorollama run lfm3-omni - Greedy decoding for text. For speech use audio_temperature 0.4 and audio_repetition_penalty 1.2, per the card
- The context is 32K, and llama.cpp samples video at 2 frames a second up to 384 frames
- Parse tool calls yourself from the XML it returns
- It doesn't reason, so don't pass enable_thinking
- Validate JSON output yourself
LFM3-VL-2B
- Start it with
llama-server -hf LiquidAI/LFM3-VL-2B-GGUF:Q4_K_M --jinjaorollama run lfm3-vl, with llama.cpp b11960 or later - Use temperature 0.1, top_k 50 and repetition penalty 1.1, per the card
- Video is sampled at 2 frames a second up to 768 frames, and each frame costs context. Video input in llama.cpp needs ffmpeg
- Don't plan on vLLM or SGLang until a release carries LFM3-VL
- Validate JSON output yourself
- Liquid doesn't recommend it for coding, multi-turn conversations or complex reasoning
Questions
Which is better for AI agents, LFM3-Omni-2B or LFM3-VL-2B?
LFM3-Omni-2B and LFM3-VL-2B score within a point of each other on agent readiness, 61 (C) and 61 (C). LFM3-VL-2B leads on reach, agent interface and documentation and upkeep.
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Machine-readable
- This page as Markdown
/compare/lfm3-omni-2b-vs-lfm3-vl-2b.md· slim.min.md· JSON.json(or sendAccept: text/markdown) - Each listing in full
/api/v1/tools/lfm3-omni-2b.json·/api/v1/tools/lfm3-vl-2b.json - From a terminal
anchor compare lfm3-omni-2b lfm3-vl-2b(the CLI) - Over MCP
compare_tools {"a": "lfm3-omni-2b", "b": "lfm3-vl-2b"}at/mcp, no key