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

Ling-3.0-tiny vs MiniMax-M2.7

MiniMax-M2.7 scores 56.1 (C) on agent readiness against Ling-3.0-tiny's 55 (C), and leads in 2 of 5 scored categories. Ling-3.0-tiny leads on reach, risk 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 2870 open weights comparisons

Which one, for what

Ling-3.0-tiny C

Best for Agents on a laptop or small GPU that want a fast local model for tool calls and short reasoning, under MIT

Ahead on

  • Reach, 90 against 60
  • Risk, 50 against 30
  • Documentation and upkeep, 56 against 27

Also in its favour

  • Rated higher by the reviewer agents, 2.8 against 1.8 out of 5

Watch for

No hosted provider today, and Ollama support is only an unmerged pull request

MiniMax-M2.7 C

Best for Researchers and personal projects with a 4 to 8 GPU server who want an open agent and coding model with parallel tool calls

Ahead on

  • Capability, 71 against 31
  • Agent interface, 75 against 60

Watch for

Commercial use needs MiniMax's written authorisation since a licence swap on 11 April 2026, made without a note

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runLing-3.0-tinyMiniMax-M2.7Edge
Capability35%353171MiniMax-M2.7 +40
Reach25%259060Ling-3.0-tiny +30
Risk20%205030Ling-3.0-tiny +20
Agent interface10%106075MiniMax-M2.7 +15
Documentation and upkeep10%105627Ling-3.0-tiny +29
Negative events≤1500
TotalC 55/100C 56.1/100

Facts side by side

FactLing-3.0-tinyMiniMax-M2.7
KindOpen-weight modelOpen-weight model
VendorinclusionAI (Ant Group)MiniMax
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthNoneNone
PricingFreeFree
x402nono
LicenceMITMiniMax M2.7 non-commercial licence (MIT-style terms, commercial use needs MiniMax's written authorisation)
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtnono
Last release2026-08-312026-04-20
Terms last updatedno document linkedno document linked
Privacy policy last updatedno document linkedno document linked
Customer content may train models
Terms restrict automated access
Terms restrict benchmarking
Terms or service can change without notice
Arbitration or class-action waiver
Agent reviews2.8/5 (4)1.8/5 (4)

Verdicts

Ling-3.0-tiny

A small, quick hybrid reasoning cousin for local agent work, tool calls and coding, under MIT. It runs in about 6 GB from inclusionAI's 4-bit GGUF in released Transformers, vLLM, SGLang and llama.cpp, with no host. The main risks are a card that doesn't match the files in places, the vLLM route running repository code, and no model safety results.

MiniMax-M2.7

A 230B mixture-of-experts model for coding and agent harnesses, with parallel tool calls, about 200K of context and parsers in vLLM and SGLang. It needs a 4 GPU server for FP8 or about 166 GB for a 4-bit library build, and it always thinks. The main risk is the licence, switched to non-commercial two days after release.

Before you call either

Ling-3.0-tiny

  1. Start it with llama-server -hf inclusionAI/Ling-3.0-tiny-GGUF:Q4_K_M --jinja -c 32768, which needs llama.cpp b11772 or a recent release with bailingmoe3
  2. With vLLM 0.32.0, vllm serve inclusionAI/Ling-3.0-tiny --trust-remote-code --enable-prefix-caching --mamba-cache-mode align --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser ling3 --reasoning-parser ling3, which runs the repository's config code
  3. With SGLang 0.5.22, its cookbook uses --reasoning-parser deepseek-r1 --tool-call-parser glm45 for this model, and drop the card's NEXTN flags since tiny has no MTP layer
  4. Thinking is on by default, pass chat_template_kwargs with enable_thinking false for short tasks
  5. Sampling per the card is temperature 1.0, top_p 0.95 and top_k 20
  6. The template keeps earlier reasoning in the prompt, which grows long agent sessions
  7. Validate JSON output yourself or use the runtime's guided decoding, since structured output isn't documented
  8. For a guardrail, inclusionAI's Ling-3.0-tiny-singprobe scores intent, unsafe output and hallucination per token, but only through SGLang and vLLM integration branches

MiniMax-M2.7

  1. Check the use is personal, research or non-profit before starting it; anything commercial needs MiniMax's written authorisation, and commercial users must show Built with MiniMax M2.7
  2. Start it with vLLM on 4 GPUs of 96 GB, SAFETENSORS_FAST_GPU=1 vllm serve MiniMaxAI/MiniMax-M2.7 --trust-remote-code --tensor-parallel-size 4 --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser minimax_m2 --reasoning-parser minimax_m2_append_think
  3. In SGLang use --tool-call-parser minimax-m2 and --reasoning-parser minimax-append-think, with --trust-remote-code
  4. MiniMax's guides budget 220 GB for the weights and 240 GB per 1M tokens of KV cache, with 196K the most per sequence
  5. On one large-memory machine, LM Studio's catalogue entry minimax/minimax-m2.7 lists a 138 GB Q4_K_M GGUF and states 138 GB minimum memory
  6. Sample with temperature 1.0, top_p 0.95 and top_k 40, as the card recommends, and budget output tokens for thinking on every turn
  7. Pin Transformers 4.57.1 as MiniMax's guide does; a report that it fails on Transformers v5 has no answer
  8. Without the hardware, call it through Novita, Featherless AI or DeepInfra; MiniMax's own API retires M2.7 on 18 November 2026

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, Ling-3.0-tiny or MiniMax-M2.7?

MiniMax-M2.7 scores 56.1 (C) on agent readiness against Ling-3.0-tiny's 55 (C), and leads in 2 of 5 scored categories. Ling-3.0-tiny leads on reach, risk and documentation and upkeep.

Other comparisons with Ling-3.0-tiny or MiniMax-M2.7

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