Ling-3.0-tiny vs Nemotron 3.5 Lightning 30B A3B

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.

Nemotron 3.5 Lightning 30B A3B

A small agent cousin, 3B active parameters, with trained parallel tool calls, a thinking switch and up to 1M tokens of context, under a permissive licence. It runs in about 23 GB from the GGUF or Ollama builds, and NVIDIA's NVFP4 build needs NVIDIA GPUs. The main risks are no published safety results and one answered question across two repositories.

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

Nemotron 3.5 Lightning 30B A3B

1. Quickest start is ollama run nemotron-3.5-lightning, about 19 to 25 GB of files depending on the platform
2. On the reference machine use llama-server -hf ggml-org/NVIDIA-Nemotron-3.5-Lightning-30B-A3B-GGUF:Q4_0 --jinja, since the card's Q4_K_M tag doesn't exist there and NVFP4 needs NVIDIA GPUs
3. With vLLM serve it with --reasoning-parser nemotron_v3 --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser qwen3_coder (SGLang uses --reasoning-parser nemotron_3)
4. Use temperature=1.0 and top_p=0.95, as the card says
5. Thinking is on by default. Pass chat_template_kwargs with enable_thinking false for short tasks
6. For coding agents pass force_nonempty_content: true in chat_template_kwargs, which vLLM's nemotron_v3 parser reads so a cut-off reasoning trace still returns content
7. Go past 262,144 tokens only with the card's flags (VLLM_ALLOW_LONG_MAX_MODEL_LEN=1, --max-model-len 1048576) and enough memory