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

Ling-3.0-tiny vs Swift 1.5 Qwen3.8-Flash-Next

Ling-3.0-tiny scores 55 (C) on agent readiness against Swift 1.5 Qwen3.8-Flash-Next's 52.3 (D), and leads in 3 of 4 scored categories. 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 45
  • Documentation and upkeep, 56 against 40

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

Swift 1.5 Qwen3.8-Flash-Next D

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.

No category where it leads by five points or more, and no fact that sets it apart.

Watch for

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

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runLing-3.0-tinySwift 1.5 Qwen3.8-Flash-NextEdge
Capability35%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Reach25%259060Ling-3.0-tiny +30
Risk20%205045Ling-3.0-tiny +5
Agent interface10%106060even
Documentation and upkeep10%105640Ling-3.0-tiny +16
Negative events≤1500
TotalC 55/100D 52.3/100

Facts side by side

FactLing-3.0-tinySwift 1.5 Qwen3.8-Flash-Next
KindOpen-weight modelOpen-weight model
VendorinclusionAI (Ant Group)UkisAI
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthNoneNone
PricingFreeFree
x402nono
LicenceMITSwift 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.txtnono
Last release2026-08-312026-09-24
Terms last updatedno 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.

Swift 1.5 Qwen3.8-Flash-Next

A large mixture-of-experts cousin, 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

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

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, Ling-3.0-tiny or Swift 1.5 Qwen3.8-Flash-Next?

Ling-3.0-tiny scores 55 (C) on agent readiness against Swift 1.5 Qwen3.8-Flash-Next's 52.3 (D), and leads in 3 of 4 scored categories.

Other comparisons with Ling-3.0-tiny or Swift 1.5 Qwen3.8-Flash-Next

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