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

LongCat-2.5 vs NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Bolt E4B 4GB

NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Bolt E4B 4GB scores 61 (C) on agent readiness against LongCat-2.5's 50.5 (D), and leads in every scored category. Both do open-weight models you run yourself.

Best open-weight models you download and run yourself for AI agents · All 6359 open weights comparisons

Which one, for what

LongCat-2.5 D

Best for Operators with NPU clusters, and anyone tracking what the open flagships can do

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

Watch for

3,562 GB in BF16 and 1,336 GB at 4 bits

NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Bolt E4B 4GB C

Best for Agents and apps that need a fast local conversational model with tool calls on an 8 to 12 GB GPU, a Mac or a Jetson, such as voice assistants and game characters.

Ahead on

  • Reach, 90 against 35
  • Risk, 80 against 60
  • Agent interface, 85 against 75
  • Documentation and upkeep, 65 against 46

Watch for

64K tokens of context against the base's 128K, and Ollama's and LM Studio's pages show 128K anyway

Why the edge

Each category where one leads by five points or more, with the reason behind each side's score from its assessment. The numbers are in the table below; this is what they stand for.

Reach NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Bolt E4B 4GB +55

LongCat-2.5 35

Memory 0, the smallest build is Meituan's W4A4 repository, 1,336 GB, and 1,336 GB × 1.2 = 1,603 GB, far above 256 GB. The BF16 files are 3,562 GB. Runtimes 0, none of the six runs it in a released version: vLLM 0.33.0, SGLang 0.5.23, Transformers 5.22.2 and llama.cpp b12242 have no LongcatCausalLM or pro_v code, and the model code config.json names isn't in the repository. Builds 10, one quantised build from Meituan, the W4A4 repository (4-bit experts, 1,336 GB). Terms 15, MIT in the metadata, the LICENSE file and the card, with nothing added. Download 10, the Hub API reports gated false for both repositories on 10 November 2026, so the files download with no account and nothing to accept. Hosted 0, Hugging Face maps no inference provider to it. 0 + 0 + 10 + 15 + 10 + 0 = 35.

NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Bolt E4B 4GB 90

Memory earns 30, since NVIDIA's Q4_K_M GGUF is 6.18 GB, 7.4 GB with a fifth added. Runtimes earn the full 25 from released llama.cpp, vLLM, Transformers, SGLang, Ollama and LM Studio. Builds earn 10, as NVIDIA's only quantised build is the Q4_K_M GGUF and the DFlash repositories are drafters. Terms earn 10, because OpenMDW-1.1 is permissive with no threshold or use policy but isn't an OSI licence, and the Gemma 4 base adds plain Apache 2.0. Download earns 10, with no gate. Hosted earns 5, as NVIDIA's own API serves it.

Risk NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Bolt E4B 4GB +20

LongCat-2.5 60

File safety 25, safetensors only, no .bin, .pt or .pth files and no Python in the repository. Provenance 15, the files sit in the meituan-longcat organisation, the name of Meituan's GitHub organisation that the card links for deployment, and the card's licence names Meituan (10). Safety evaluation 0, no safety results on the card. Agent guidance 5, General cautions under Usage Considerations: not evaluated for every use, assess accuracy, safety and fairness before sensitive use, and follow the law. Licence risk 15, MIT with no use policy, no threshold and no right to change the terms. Security programme 0, no way to report a flaw on the card beyond a general contact, and Meituan's own security pages weren't looked up, so this scores as absent and is an open question. 25 + 15 + 0 + 5 + 15 + 0 = 60.

NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Bolt E4B 4GB 80

File safety earns 25, safetensors and GGUF only, and the documented routes run no repository code (an undocumented Inference Endpoints handler.py sits in the BF16 repository). Provenance earns 15, NVIDIA's linked organisation with a hash for every file. Safety evaluation earns 0, since NVIDIA names its content-safety and bias datasets but publishes no results. Agent guidance earns 15, for instruction-hierarchy training NVIDIA documents and a subcard on prompt injection and the safeguards to add. Licence risk keeps all 15 under OpenMDW-1.1 and Apache 2.0. The security programme earns 10 for the card's reporting route and NVIDIA's public bulletins.

Documentation and upkeep NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Bolt E4B 4GB +19

LongCat-2.5 46

Model card 11, Intended use, limitations (the usage considerations), the architecture and the parameter counts are on the card. Training data 5, A general description of the training stages and where the reinforcement learning tasks came from, with no sources, sizes or cut-off. Last change 20, the last commit, on 10 November 2026, updated the card, on the day of this check. Responsiveness 0, Neither of the 2 discussions that aren't pull requests (9 and 10 November 2026) has a reply from a meituan-longcat member, counted on 10 November by author flags and dates with a script, text not read. Version policy 5, LongCat-2.0 stays in its own repositories and 2.5 came out in new ones, with no dated note on the older ones that we read. File health 5, the template is in both places and agrees, but config.json's auto_map names configuration_longcat_oe and modeling_longcat_oe, which aren't in the repository, and the tokenizer config's 131,072-token length is a quarter of the config's 524,288 positions. 11 + 5 + 20 + 0 + 5 + 5 = 46.

NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Bolt E4B 4GB 65

The model card earns 20, all seven items with limitations in the linked subcard. Training data earns 15, the RL datasets published and a cut-off given, but the card's data section describes a larger SFT corpus the report says wasn't used, and the base's pre-training is described only in general. Last change earns 20 for 23 October 2026. Responsiveness earns 0, as NVIDIA hasn't answered either of the two discussions. Version policy earns 5 as a first release whose GGUF was replaced on release day with only a commit title. File health earns 5, since the card and the template disagree on the thinking default and both cards carry leftover lines.

Agent interface NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Bolt E4B 4GB +10

LongCat-2.5 75

Chat template 20, chat_template.jinja in the repository (11,823 characters), with a copy in tokenizer_config.json. Tool-calling format 25, the card documents how tools are declared (the OpenAI function format) and how calls come back (tool_calls with an id, a name and JSON arguments, answered by a tool message), in a worked example against an OpenAI-compatible server. Trained tool calling 10, the card describes reinforcement learning on long agentic tasks and shows one tool call in a turn. Structured output 0, Nothing on the card about JSON or schema-constrained output. Reasoning control 10, enable_thinking on or off per request through chat_template_kwargs, with the reasoning returned as reasoning_content, both shown on the card. Context 10, the card states no context length, but config.json gives 524,288 positions and the card's own evaluations ran at 512K and 1M sequence lengths after what it calls long-context training, so 128K or more is taken as trained. 20 + 25 + 10 + 0 + 10 + 10 = 75.

NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Bolt E4B 4GB 85

The chat template earns 20, a Jinja file in the repository and the GGUF. The tool-calling format earns 25, with OpenAI-style tools, the gemma4 parser named and an asynchronous pattern documented. Trained tool calling earns 20, multi-step tool-use training and several calls per turn. Structured output earns 5, trained but with no instructions. Reasoning control earns 10, thinking per request, the reasoning returned apart and a budget. Context earns 5 for 64K, half the base's 128K.

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runLongCat-2.5NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Bolt E4B 4GBEdge
Capability35%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Reach25%253590NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Bolt E4B 4GB +55
Risk20%206080NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Bolt E4B 4GB +20
Agent interface10%107585NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Bolt E4B 4GB +10
Documentation and upkeep10%104665NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Bolt E4B 4GB +19
Negative events≤1500
TotalD 50.5/100C 61/100

Facts side by side

FactLongCat-2.5NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Bolt E4B 4GB
KindOpen-weight modelOpen-weight model
VendorMeituan (LongCat)NVIDIA
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthNoneNone
PricingFreeFree
x402nono
LicenceMITOpenMDW-1.1
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtnono
Last release2026-11-102026-10-23
Terms last updatednot read yetno document linked
Privacy policy last updatedno document linkedno document linked
Agent reviewsnone4/5 (4)

Verdicts

LongCat-2.5

Meituan's flagship is MIT-licensed and documented for tool calling and switchable reasoning, with strong numbers of its own on agentic coding. Almost nobody can run it: 3,562 GB of weights, a 1,336 GB 4-bit build for NPU accelerators, and no released runtime with its architecture. A model to watch until a runtime or a provider picks it up.

NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Bolt E4B 4GB

A small cousin for voice and device assistants, game characters and robot interfaces, trained for multi-turn tool calls, instruction hierarchy and short spoken replies, with thinking switchable per request. NVIDIA's Q4_K_M GGUF needs about 8 GB, and Ollama and LM Studio carry it. Context is 64K, half the Gemma 4 base, and NVIDIA publishes no safety results.

Before you call either

LongCat-2.5

  1. You can't run this on a workstation or a single GPU server. Plan for a provider, and none serves it yet
  2. If an operator serves it, call it as an OpenAI-compatible chat API with tools in the function format
  3. Pass chat_template_kwargs with enable_thinking true or false
  4. With thinking on, keep earlier reasoning in the history (save_history_reasoning_content true), as the card recommends
  5. The card's results use temperature 1.0 and top_p 0.95
  6. Its benchmark table is Meituan's own. The unmarked scores are in-house

NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Bolt E4B 4GB

  1. Quickest start is ollama run nemotron-3.5-bolt:e4b, about 8 GB of files, and set num_ctx to 65536 or less, since NVIDIA supports 64K
  2. With NVIDIA's GGUF use llama-server -m Nemotron-3.5-Bolt-E4B-Q4_K_M.gguf -c 65536 -ngl 999 --jinja, and add --reasoning on --reasoning-budget <tokens> to cap thinking
  3. With vLLM 0.31.0 or later pass --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser gemma4 --reasoning-parser gemma4 and the repository's chat_template.jinja
  4. Pass enable_thinking explicitly in chat_template_kwargs, since the template defaults to off whatever the card says, and set skip_special_tokens false as the card's examples do
  5. Use temperature=1.0 and top_p=0.95 in both modes, as the card says
  6. Set conversational_mode true for spoken replies, which appends a brevity instruction to the system prompt
  7. Answer a slow tool at once with a pending tool message, then send the result later as a user message starting TOOL RESULT, as the card's asynchronous pattern says
  8. Keep persistent rules in the system prompt and send state updates as separate user or system messages in order, per the card's prompting guidelines

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, LongCat-2.5 or NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Bolt E4B 4GB?

NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Bolt E4B 4GB scores 61 (C) on agent readiness against LongCat-2.5's 50.5 (D), and leads in every scored category.

Other comparisons with LongCat-2.5 or NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Bolt E4B 4GB

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