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

LFM3-VL-2B vs Mistral Large 4

LFM3-VL-2B scores 61 (C) on agent readiness against Mistral Large 4's 54.6 (C), and leads in 2 of 4 scored categories. Mistral Large 4 leads on risk and agent interface. 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-VL-2B C

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 50
  • Documentation and upkeep, 77 against 64

Watch for

vLLM and SGLang support is unreleased, which the card says itself

Mistral Large 4 C

Best for Operators with an 8-GPU Blackwell or H200 node who want a frontier-sized open model for coding agents and defensive security, with a hosted twin on Mistral's API.

Ahead on

  • Risk, 75 against 40
  • Agent interface, 95 against 90

Watch for

The smallest 4-bit build needs about 732 GB, so nothing fits a single workstation or a 128 GB machine

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.

Reach LFM3-VL-2B +35

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.

Mistral Large 4 50

Memory scores 0, since the smallest 4-bit build, Mistral's NVFP4, is 610 GB, about 732 GB with a fifth added, far above 256 GB. Runtimes score 10, released Transformers and llama.cpp have the architecture, while vLLM v0.33.0 and SGLang v0.5.23 still lack it, the llama.cpp build Ollama 0.40.14 pins predates it, and LM Studio has no entry. Builds score 15 for Mistral's FP8 and NVFP4 releases. Terms score 10, a modified MIT licence that is free commercially except for Model-as-a-Service businesses. Download scores 10 with no gate, and hosted too scores 5 because Mistral's API serves these weights. 0 + 10 + 15 + 10 + 10 + 5 = 50.

Risk Mistral Large 4 +35

LFM3-VL-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.

Mistral Large 4 75

File safety scores 25, safetensors only and loaded by Transformers' own code with a Jinja template. Provenance scores 15, Mistral's verified organisation with a hash on every file. Safety evaluation scores 10, refusal and prompt-injection results Mistral ran itself, listed in its 2 November technical report as internal, and red-teaming by outside firms with nothing published. Agent guidance scores 10 for a statement of what the refusals cover and a claim of trained injection resistance, with only general safeguards. Licence risk scores 10, 5 off for the Model-as-a-Service limit. The security programme scores 5 for security.txt with no public advisories. 25 + 15 + 10 + 10 + 10 + 5 = 75.

Documentation and upkeep LFM3-VL-2B +13

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.

Mistral Large 4 64

The card covers intended use, architecture, parameters, context and languages, and misses limitations and a cut-off (14). Training data is described by its mix in the technical report, with no sources, cut-off or filtering (5). The files changed on 2 November 2026, when the report was added (20). A Mistral member replied in three of nine discussions (10). It's a first release with older Large models in their own repositories and no dated note (5), and the files agree with each other and the card (10). 14 + 5 + 20 + 10 + 5 + 10 = 64.

Agent interface Mistral Large 4 +5

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.

Mistral Large 4 95

The chat template is in the repository (20). The card documents how tools are declared and come back and names the parser (25), and the template renders several calls in one turn (20). Strict JSON Schema output is documented with how to ask for it (15). Reasoning effort is budgeted per request with the reasoning returned apart from the answer (10). Context scores 5, because the 1M window comes from YaRN scaling and the technical report gives 40K as the longest pretraining sequence. 20 + 25 + 20 + 15 + 10 + 5 = 95.

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runLFM3-VL-2BMistral Large 4Edge
Capability35%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Reach25%258550LFM3-VL-2B +35
Risk20%204075Mistral Large 4 +35
Agent interface10%109095Mistral Large 4 +5
Documentation and upkeep10%107764LFM3-VL-2B +13
Negative events≤1500
TotalC 61/100C 54.6/100

Facts side by side

FactLFM3-VL-2BMistral Large 4
KindOpen-weight modelOpen-weight model
VendorLiquid AIMistral AI
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthNoneNone
PricingFreeFree
x402nono
LicenceLFM Open License v1.0 (free commercial use below $10M annual revenue)Mistral Ecosystem Open-Weight License (modified MIT)
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtyesno
Last release2026-11-092026-10-29
Terms last updatedno document linkedno document linked
Privacy policy last updatedno document linkedno document linked

Verdicts

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.

Mistral Large 4

A 1T-parameter mixture-of-experts model from Mistral for coding agents and defensive security, with strict JSON Schema output, parallel tool calls and three reasoning efforts. It needs a multi-GPU server, about 732 GB for the smallest 4-bit build, and no released vLLM or SGLang loads it. The licence bars Model-as-a-Service businesses without a separate deal.

Before you call either

LFM3-VL-2B

  1. Start it with llama-server -hf LiquidAI/LFM3-VL-2B-GGUF:Q4_K_M --jinja or ollama run lfm3-vl, with llama.cpp b11960 or later
  2. Use temperature 0.1, top_k 50 and repetition penalty 1.1, per the card
  3. Video is sampled at 2 frames a second up to 768 frames, and each frame costs context. Video input in llama.cpp needs ffmpeg
  4. Don't plan on vLLM or SGLang until a release carries LFM3-VL
  5. Validate JSON output yourself
  6. Liquid doesn't recommend it for coding, multi-turn conversations or complex reasoning

Mistral Large 4

  1. Serve the NVFP4 build on Blackwell with vllm/vllm-openai:mistral-large-4 --model mistralai/Mistral-Large-4-1T-A52B-NVFP4 --tensor-parallel-size 8 --kv-cache-dtype fp8_ds_mla --tool-call-parser mistral --reasoning-parser mistral --enable-auto-tool-choice; released vLLM doesn't load it
  2. On H200 use the FP8 build with tensor parallelism of 16 or 8 by 2 pipelines, per vLLM's recipe
  3. Pass reasoning_effort low, medium or high (default high); any other value makes the template raise an error, and there is no off switch
  4. Read the reasoning from message.reasoning; max_completion_tokens counts reasoning tokens too
  5. Use temperature 1.0 and top_p 0.95 at every effort, per the card
  6. Ask for JSON with response_format type json_schema and strict true; the template passes the schema to the model
  7. The template rejects a tool message straight after a user message and a conversation that doesn't start with a user or system message
  8. Add --speculative-config '{"method": "dspark", "num_speculative_tokens": 3}' to use the embedded draft head
  9. If you'll offer it to others as a hosted model, read the licence first; Model-as-a-Service use needs Mistral's commercial licence

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, LFM3-VL-2B or Mistral Large 4?

LFM3-VL-2B scores 61 (C) on agent readiness against Mistral Large 4's 54.6 (C), and leads in 2 of 4 scored categories. Mistral Large 4 leads on risk and agent interface.

Other comparisons with LFM3-VL-2B or Mistral Large 4

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