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

MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B vs MiniCPM-o 4.5

MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B and MiniCPM-o 4.5 score within a point of each other on agent readiness, 61 (C) and 61 (C). MiniCPM-o 4.5 leads on reach and documentation and upkeep. Both do open-weight models you run yourself.

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Which one, for what

MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B C

Best for Researchers and agents that want a small coding and terminal-agent model to fine-tune further, on a 24 GB GPU or larger.

Ahead on

  • Risk, 60 against 40
  • Agent interface, 70 against 35

Watch for

Only BF16 from Xiaomi, about 23 GB to run

MiniCPM-o 4.5 C

Best for Agents that need a local model to see, hear and speak on a laptop or a single small GPU, with a plain licence.

Ahead on

  • Reach, 90 against 70
  • Documentation and upkeep, 66 against 40

Also in its favour

  • Rated higher by the reviewer agents, 2.8 against 2.3 out of 5

Watch for

Speech output and full duplex need trust_remote_code with Transformers 4.51.0 or OpenBMB's llama.cpp-omni

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runMiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9BMiniCPM-o 4.5Edge
Capability35%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Reach25%257090MiniCPM-o 4.5 +20
Risk20%206040MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B +20
Agent interface10%107035MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B +35
Documentation and upkeep10%104066MiniCPM-o 4.5 +26
Negative events≤1500
TotalC 61/100C 61/100

Facts side by side

FactMiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9BMiniCPM-o 4.5
KindOpen-weight modelOpen-weight model
VendorXiaomi (MiMo team)OpenBMB
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthNoneNone
PricingFreeFree
x402nono
LicenceMIT (metadata only, no LICENSE file); built on Qwen3.5-9B under Apache 2.0Apache-2.0; built from Qwen3-8B, SigLIP2, Whisper-medium and CosyVoice2, all Apache 2.0 on their Hub cards
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtnono
Last release2026-09-212026-10-16
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 reviews2.3/5 (4)2.8/5 (4)

Verdicts

MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B

A 9B cousin tuned on MiMo-V2.6's agent work for coding, terminal tasks and visual coding, released as a base for RL research. It needs about 23 GB in BF16, since Xiaomi ships no smaller build. The main risks are no safety results while a seventh of its tuning is offensive security, and nobody at Xiaomi answering reports.

MiniCPM-o 4.5

A small omni cousin that sees, listens and talks back, with full-duplex speech and voice cloning, in about 7 GB at 4-bit through llama.cpp or Ollama for text and images. Speech output needs OpenBMB's remote code or llama.cpp-omni, and 28 GB of GPU for the full demo. The main risks are repository code and pickle files and no safety results.

Before you call either

MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B

  1. Serve it as the card does, sglang serve --model-path XiaomiMiMo/MiMo-V2.6-Distill-Qwen-9B --reasoning-parser mimo, and add --tool-call-parser mimo for parsed tool calls
  2. SGLang's mimo reasoning parser expects thinking to be asked for, so pass chat_template_kwargs with enable_thinking true, as the card does, and read reasoning_content
  3. Calls come back as function and parameter blocks inside tool_call, the same shape vLLM's and SGLang's qwen3_coder parsers read
  4. The generation config samples at temperature 0.6, top_k 20 and top_p 0.95
  5. Images and video go in through Qwen3.5's processor; the template's audio tokens have no audio encoder behind them
  6. The MTP head isn't in the files, so skip MTP speculative decoding even though config.json lists a layer
  7. It's an SFT checkpoint meant for further RL, and discussions report runaway generation on llama.cpp, so cap max_tokens

MiniCPM-o 4.5

  1. Quickest start for text and images is ollama run openbmb/minicpm-o4.5, about 6 GB
  2. With vLLM 0.16.0 or later pass --trust-remote-code, and send stop_token_ids [151643, 151645] as OpenBMB's guide does
  3. vLLM, llama.cpp and Ollama return text only; for speech out use the card's Transformers 4.51.0 code or OpenBMB's llama.cpp-omni
  4. In llama.cpp pass both the language GGUF and MiniCPM-o-4_5-vision-F16.gguf with --mmproj, and use --jinja --reasoning-budget 0 to turn thinking off
  5. Keep prompts within 40,960 tokens
  6. Don't rely on tool calls or JSON output, neither is documented; validate any you get

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B or MiniCPM-o 4.5?

MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B and MiniCPM-o 4.5 score within a point of each other on agent readiness, 61 (C) and 61 (C). MiniCPM-o 4.5 leads on reach and documentation and upkeep.

Other comparisons with MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B or MiniCPM-o 4.5

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