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

Ling-3.0-tiny vs Qwen3.8-27B

Qwen3.8-27B scores 68.6 (B) on agent readiness against Ling-3.0-tiny's 55 (C), and leads in 3 of 5 scored categories. Ling-3.0-tiny 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 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

  • Documentation and upkeep, 56 against 36

Watch for

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

Qwen3.8-27B B

Best for Agents that want a capable open model with vision on one 24 to 32 GB GPU or Mac, with the widest runtime support and a plain licence.

Ahead on

  • Capability, 70 against 31
  • Risk, 55 against 50
  • Agent interface, 70 against 60

Watch for

No safety results, prompt-injection guidance or security contact

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runLing-3.0-tinyQwen3.8-27BEdge
Capability35%353170Qwen3.8-27B +39
Reach25%259090even
Risk20%205055Qwen3.8-27B +5
Agent interface10%106070Qwen3.8-27B +10
Documentation and upkeep10%105636Ling-3.0-tiny +20
Negative events≤1500
TotalC 55/100B 68.6/100

Facts side by side

FactLing-3.0-tinyQwen3.8-27B
KindOpen-weight modelOpen-weight model
VendorinclusionAI (Ant Group)Alibaba (Qwen team)
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthNoneNone
PricingFreeFree
x402nono
LicenceMITApache-2.0
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtnono
Last release2026-08-312026-08-14
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)3/5 (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.

Qwen3.8-27B

A dense cousin for coding and agent work with image and video input that runs almost anywhere. Ollama's 4-bit build needs about 22 GB, and five providers host it for agents without the hardware. The main risk is that nobody at Alibaba answers, there are no safety results or agent guidance, and the tool format is only in the template.

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

Qwen3.8-27B

  1. Quickest start is ollama run qwen3.8, about 18 GB of files
  2. On our reference machine use BF16 with vllm serve Qwen/Qwen3.8-27B --max-model-len 131072 --reasoning-parser qwen3 --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser qwen3_coder, since FP8 on gfx1151 isn't documented
  3. Use the qwen3_coder tool parser, SGLang's cookbook says the Hermes parser leaves its calls unparsed
  4. Thinking is on by default, pass chat_template_kwargs with enable_thinking false for short tasks, and read the reasoning from reasoning_content
  5. reasoning_effort takes xhigh (default), medium or low, and any other value makes the template raise an error
  6. Sampling per the card is temperature 1.0 and top_p 0.95 when thinking, temperature 0.7, top_p 0.8 and presence_penalty 1.5 without
  7. Preserved thinking keeps earlier reasoning in the context unless preserve_thinking is false, which grows long agent sessions
  8. Turn on YaRN only beyond 262,144 tokens, the card warns static YaRN can cost quality on short texts
  9. Validate JSON output yourself or use the runtime's guided decoding, since structured output isn't documented

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, Ling-3.0-tiny or Qwen3.8-27B?

Qwen3.8-27B scores 68.6 (B) on agent readiness against Ling-3.0-tiny's 55 (C), and leads in 3 of 5 scored categories. Ling-3.0-tiny leads on documentation and upkeep.

Other comparisons with Ling-3.0-tiny or Qwen3.8-27B

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