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

LFM3-VL-2B vs Swift 1.5 Qwen3.8-Flash-Next

LFM3-VL-2B scores 61 (C) on agent readiness against Swift 1.5 Qwen3.8-Flash-Next's 54.2 (C), and leads in 3 of 4 scored categories. Swift 1.5 Qwen3.8-Flash-Next leads on risk. Both do open-weight models you run yourself.

Best open-weight models you download and run yourself for AI agents · All 6359 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 65
  • Agent interface, 90 against 60
  • Documentation and upkeep, 77 against 40

Watch for

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

Swift 1.5 Qwen3.8-Flash-Next C

Best for Teams under US$1M revenue, or researchers, with an 8-GPU node who want Qwen3.8-Flash-Next with shorter thinking for coding and agent work.

Ahead on

  • Risk, 45 against 40

Watch for

Two licences to satisfy, UkisAI's US$1M revenue limit and Qwen's separate licence for model-as-a-service businesses

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 +37

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.

Swift 1.5 Qwen3.8-Flash-Next 40

Model card 5 of 20, intended use and context only. Training data 5, a general description with no cut-off. Last change 20, UkisAI added an IQ3_S tier to its GSQ-RCO GGUF build on 7 October 2026, 28 days before this check; the main repository's only commit is the 24 September release. Responsiveness 0, UkisAI answered none of 3 discussions. Version policy 5, a first release, renamed without a note. File health 5, the re-serialised tokenizer splits text differently from the repository's own tokenizer config and the base. 5 + 5 + 20 + 0 + 5 + 5 = 40.

Agent interface LFM3-VL-2B +30

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.

Swift 1.5 Qwen3.8-Flash-Next 60

Chat template 20, the base's Jinja file. Tool-calling format 10 of 25, the format is only in the template and the card's two commands name different parsers. Trained tool calling 20, several calls a turn and agentic post-training. Structured output 0, not documented. Reasoning control 0, the card shows how to set reasoning_effort but not how to turn thinking off or where the reasoning comes back. Context 10, 262,144 tokens native.

Reach LFM3-VL-2B +20

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.

Swift 1.5 Qwen3.8-Flash-Next 65

Memory 5 of 30, the smallest 4-bit build is UkisAI's IQ4_XS GGUF at 98.6 GB with the vision projector, 118.3 GB with a fifth, above the reference machine's GPU share and within 256 GB. Runtimes 25, the architecture is Qwen3.8-Flash-Next's (qwen4_exp), which released llama.cpp, vLLM, SGLang and Transformers run, and Ollama runs it through its pinned llama.cpp (b11963 in v0.40.14), this run's reading for Ollama. Builds 15, GGUF, INT4 and NVFP4 builds from UkisAI. Terms 10, two custom licences that allow commercial use within limits. Download 10, not gated. Hosted 0, no provider serves it, and UkisAI's research API on the card couldn't be shown to serve it, since robots.txt disallows calling it. 5 + 25 + 15 + 10 + 10 + 0 = 65.

Risk Swift 1.5 Qwen3.8-Flash-Next +5

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.

Swift 1.5 Qwen3.8-Flash-Next 45

File safety 25, safetensors only and no code in the repository, though the card's vLLM command passes trust-remote-code. Provenance 15, the files are in the account UkisAI's site links to, with a checksum on every file. Safety evaluation 0, none published. Agent guidance 0, nothing on prompt injection, refusals or safeguards. Licence risk 5, read across the chain, Qwen's field-of-use limit and the revenue and user thresholds of both licences. Security programme 0, no way to report a flaw was found.

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runLFM3-VL-2BSwift 1.5 Qwen3.8-Flash-NextEdge
Capability35%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Reach25%258565LFM3-VL-2B +20
Risk20%204045Swift 1.5 Qwen3.8-Flash-Next +5
Agent interface10%109060LFM3-VL-2B +30
Documentation and upkeep10%107740LFM3-VL-2B +37
Negative events≤1500
TotalC 61/100C 54.2/100

Facts side by side

FactLFM3-VL-2BSwift 1.5 Qwen3.8-Flash-Next
KindOpen-weight modelOpen-weight model
VendorLiquid AIUkisAI
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthNoneNone
PricingFreeFree
x402nono
LicenceLFM Open License v1.0 (free commercial use below $10M annual revenue)Swift Open License v1.0 (custom, not an OSI licence) on UkisAI's changes, free for commercial use below US$1M gross annual revenue, plus the Qwen Community License 1.0 on the base, which needs a separate licence from Qwen for a Model as a Service or AI Work Assistant business and the model name shown above 100M monthly users or US$20M monthly revenue
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtyesno
Last release2026-11-092026-09-24
Terms last updatedno document linkedno date given
Privacy policy last updatedno document linkedno document linked
Customer content may train modelsnot read yetnot found in the text
Terms restrict automated accessnot read yetnot found in the text
Terms restrict benchmarkingnot read yetnot found in the text
Terms or service can change without noticenot read yetnot found in the text
Arbitration or class-action waivernot read yetnot found in the text
Agent reviewsnone1.8/5 (4)

How the scores have moved

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.

Swift 1.5 Qwen3.8-Flash-Next

A mixture-of-experts vision-language model, Qwen3.8-Flash-Next post-trained to think in fewer tokens, for coding and long agent sessions on a multi-GPU server. Its smallest 4-bit build needs about 118 GB, so it fits our reference machine only at 3-bit. The main risks are a re-serialised tokenizer that differs from the base's and no answers from UkisAI.

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

Swift 1.5 Qwen3.8-Flash-Next

  1. On a multi-GPU node use vllm serve ukisai/Swift1.5-Qwen3.8-Flash-Next --tensor-parallel-size 8 --max-model-len 262144 --reasoning-parser qwen3 --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser qwen3_coder, the parser the base's recipes and the card's SGLang command use
  2. The card's vLLM command passes --trust-remote-code and the old repository name, neither is needed
  3. On our reference machine only UkisAI's GSQ-RCO IQ3_S GGUF (84.7 GB with the projector) fits, below 4-bit
  4. Set reasoning effort per request with chat_template_kwargs reasoning_effort xhigh (default), medium or low. UkisAI's own runs lose about 2.5 points at medium and low
  5. If text with combining marks matters, compare tokenisation against the base's tokenizer.json before trusting outputs
  6. Check both licences before commercial use, UkisAI's stops at US$1M gross annual revenue and Qwen's needs a separate licence for model-as-a-service businesses

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, LFM3-VL-2B or Swift 1.5 Qwen3.8-Flash-Next?

LFM3-VL-2B scores 61 (C) on agent readiness against Swift 1.5 Qwen3.8-Flash-Next's 54.2 (C), and leads in 3 of 4 scored categories. Swift 1.5 Qwen3.8-Flash-Next leads on risk.

Other comparisons with LFM3-VL-2B or Swift 1.5 Qwen3.8-Flash-Next

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