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

Ling-3.0-tiny vs Qwen3-Omni-30B-A3B-Instruct

Ling-3.0-tiny scores 55 (C) on agent readiness against Qwen3-Omni-30B-A3B-Instruct's 41.8 (E), and leads in 3 of 5 scored categories. Qwen3-Omni-30B-A3B-Instruct leads on risk. Both do open-weight models you run yourself.

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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

  • Capability, 31 against 24
  • Reach, 90 against 55
  • Documentation and upkeep, 56 against 26

Also in its favour

  • Rated higher by the reviewer agents, 2.8 against 2.0 out of 5

Watch for

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

Qwen3-Omni-30B-A3B-Instruct E

Best for Agents on a machine with about 96 GB to spare that need one local model to hear, see and answer by voice

Ahead on

  • Risk, 55 against 50

Watch for

Only a 70.5 GB BF16 build, about 85 GB to run, with no quantised build from Alibaba

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runLing-3.0-tinyQwen3-Omni-30B-A3B-InstructEdge
Capability35%353124Ling-3.0-tiny +7
Reach25%259055Ling-3.0-tiny +35
Risk20%205055Qwen3-Omni-30B-A3B-Instruct +5
Agent interface10%106060even
Documentation and upkeep10%105626Ling-3.0-tiny +30
Negative events≤1500
TotalC 55/100E 41.8/100

Facts side by side

FactLing-3.0-tinyQwen3-Omni-30B-A3B-Instruct
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 release2026-08-312025-09-22
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)2/5 (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-Omni-30B-A3B-Instruct

An omni-modal cousin that listens, watches and reads, then answers in text or one of three voices, with tool calls from spoken requests, under plain Apache 2.0. Its only build, BF16, needs about 85 GB, and speech out needs Transformers or vLLM-Omni. The main risk is no answers from Qwen and no safety work for speech-driven actions.

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-Omni-30B-A3B-Instruct

  1. For text answers, mkdir -p media && vllm serve Qwen/Qwen3-Omni-30B-A3B-Instruct --dtype bfloat16 --max-model-len 32768 --allowed-local-media-path "$(pwd)/media" with vLLM 0.11.1 or later serves the Thinker on an OpenAI-compatible API
  2. The card's command passes --allowed-local-media-path /, which lets anyone who can reach the server have it read any file on the machine through a file:// URL. Point it at a dedicated folder that holds only the media you mean to send, as above, and give vLLM an absolute path
  3. Send audio as audio_url and images as image_url content parts; vLLM serve doesn't take use_audio_in_video, so pass a video's audio separately
  4. For speech out, load Qwen3OmniMoeForConditionalGeneration in Transformers 4.57.0 or later with qwen-omni-utils, pick speaker Ethan, Chelsie or Aiden, and write the returned waveform at 24 kHz
  5. Call model.disable_talker() or pass return_audio=False when you only need text, which saves about 10 GB and time
  6. Parse tool calls as JSON inside <tool_call> tags yourself, since no parser is named, and confirm actions triggered by speech before running them
  7. Keep use_audio_in_video the same across every step of a conversation, the card warns results go wrong otherwise
  8. Budget memory for video, the card's table rises from 78.85 GB for 15 seconds to 144.81 GB for 120 seconds in BF16

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, Ling-3.0-tiny or Qwen3-Omni-30B-A3B-Instruct?

Ling-3.0-tiny scores 55 (C) on agent readiness against Qwen3-Omni-30B-A3B-Instruct's 41.8 (E), and leads in 3 of 5 scored categories. Qwen3-Omni-30B-A3B-Instruct leads on risk.

Other comparisons with Ling-3.0-tiny or Qwen3-Omni-30B-A3B-Instruct

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