Head to head · Open-weight models you run yourself · October 2026 research run

LFM3-Omni-2B vs Qwen3.5-4B

Qwen3.5-4B and LFM3-Omni-2B score within a point of each other on agent readiness, 61.2 (C) and 61 (C). LFM3-Omni-2B leads on 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

LFM3-Omni-2B C

Best for Voice and camera agents on a laptop or phone that want one small model for hearing, seeing, speaking and calling tools

Ahead on

  • Documentation and upkeep, 49 against 34

Watch for

Only llama.cpp and Ollama run it in a release

Qwen3.5-4B C

Best for Agents that want a cheap local helper for tool calls, short reasoning and reading images on a laptop or small GPU

Ahead on

  • Reach, 85 against 80
  • Risk, 55 against 40

Watch for

No quantised build from Alibaba for this size

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.

Risk Qwen3.5-4B +15

LFM3-Omni-2B 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.

Qwen3.5-4B 55

Safetensors only with no remote code gives file safety its 25, and files in the Qwen organisation the publisher's GitHub links to, each with a hash on the Hub, give provenance 15. The Apache 2.0 licence carries none of the deductions, so licence risk keeps 15. Safety evaluation, agent guidance and a security programme score 0, since the card has no safety results or cautions and no reporting route was found. The Qwen3.5 blog and Alibaba's security response centre couldn't be read, so those two are scored as absent and left open.

Documentation and upkeep LFM3-Omni-2B +15

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.

Qwen3.5-4B 34

The card covers five of the seven items and misses limitations and a cut-off (14). Training data is a general description without a cut-off (5). The files last changed on 2 March 2026, 245 days before 2 November, which is within a year (5). No Qwen member has answered any of the 21 discussions that aren't pull requests, four of them opened since 21 October (0), and the GitHub issues couldn't be counted. Earlier 4B models stay in their own repositories without dated notes (5), and two pull requests fixing the template and adding generation_config.json wait unanswered (5). 14 + 5 + 5 + 0 + 5 + 5 = 34.

Reach Qwen3.5-4B +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.

Qwen3.5-4B 85

Memory earns the full 30 because Ollama's own Q4_K_M build is 3.3 GB, about 4 GB with the fifth added, though Alibaba itself publishes no quantised 4B, so builds scores 0. Runtimes reach the 25 cap on vLLM's stable release, Transformers 5.2.0, llama.cpp, Ollama's library and LM Studio's catalogue. Apache 2.0 with nothing added gives the full 15 for terms, the ungated repository the full 10 for download, and two providers (featherless-ai, live on Hugging Face on 2 November, and Doubleword's own list per the 21 October check) the 5 for hosted too. 30 + 25 + 0 + 15 + 10 + 5 = 85.

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runLFM3-Omni-2BQwen3.5-4BEdge
Capability35%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Reach25%258085Qwen3.5-4B +5
Risk20%204055Qwen3.5-4B +15
Agent interface10%107070even
Documentation and upkeep10%104934LFM3-Omni-2B +15
Negative events≤1500
TotalC 61/100C 61.2/100

Facts side by side

FactLFM3-Omni-2BQwen3.5-4B
KindOpen-weight modelOpen-weight model
VendorLiquid AIAlibaba (Qwen team)
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthNoneNone
PricingFreeFree
x402nono
LicenceLFM Open License v1.0 (free commercial use below $10M annual revenue)Apache-2.0
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtyesno
Last release2026-11-032026-03-02
Terms last updatedno document linkedno document linked
Privacy policy last updatedno document linkedno document linked
Agent reviewsnone3/5 (4)

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.

Qwen3.5-4B

A small vision-language cousin for tool calls, light agent steps and image or video reading on almost any machine, with switchable thinking. Ollama's 3.3 GB build or the 9.3 GB BF16 files run in every major runtime under plain Apache 2.0. The main risks are no safety results, no structured-output guarantee and no answers from Alibaba since March.

Before you call either

LFM3-Omni-2B

  1. Start it with llama-server -hf LiquidAI/LFM3-Omni-2B-GGUF:Q4_K_M --jinja or ollama run lfm3-omni
  2. Greedy decoding for text. For speech use audio_temperature 0.4 and audio_repetition_penalty 1.2, per the card
  3. The context is 32K, and llama.cpp samples video at 2 frames a second up to 384 frames
  4. Parse tool calls yourself from the XML it returns
  5. It doesn't reason, so don't pass enable_thinking
  6. Validate JSON output yourself

Qwen3.5-4B

  1. Smallest start is ollama run qwen3.5:4b (Q4_K_M, about 4 GB with context)
  2. Full precision vllm serve Qwen/Qwen3.5-4B --port 8000 --max-model-len 262144 --reasoning-parser qwen3 --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser qwen3_coder
  3. Turn thinking off with "chat_template_kwargs": {"enable_thinking": false} in the request body, since it's on by default and /think and /nothink aren't supported
  4. There's no generation_config.json, so pass the card's sampling yourself, for example temperature=0.7, top_p=0.8, top_k=20, presence_penalty=1.5 without thinking
  5. Keep the context at 128K or more if you rely on thinking, and turn on YaRN only past 262,144 tokens
  6. Validate any JSON it returns, since structured output isn't documented

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, LFM3-Omni-2B or Qwen3.5-4B?

Qwen3.5-4B and LFM3-Omni-2B score within a point of each other on agent readiness, 61.2 (C) and 61 (C). LFM3-Omni-2B leads on documentation and upkeep.

Other comparisons with LFM3-Omni-2B or Qwen3.5-4B

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