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

MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B vs Nemotron 3 Nano Omni 30B A3B Reasoning

MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B and Nemotron 3 Nano Omni 30B A3B Reasoning score within a point of each other on agent readiness, 61 (C) and 60.7 (C). Nemotron 3 Nano Omni 30B A3B Reasoning leads on reach, agent interface 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.

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

Watch for

Only BF16 from Xiaomi, about 23 GB to run

Nemotron 3 Nano Omni 30B A3B Reasoning C

Best for Agents with a 32 to 48 GB NVIDIA GPU that need one local model to read video, audio, documents and screens and call tools

Ahead on

  • Reach, 85 against 70
  • Agent interface, 90 against 70
  • Documentation and upkeep, 65 against 40

Also in its favour

  • Rated higher by the reviewer agents, 3.0 against 2.3 out of 5

Watch for

Loads with trust_remote_code in every documented runtime command

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runMiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9BNemotron 3 Nano Omni 30B A3B ReasoningEdge
Capability35%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Reach25%257085Nemotron 3 Nano Omni 30B A3B Reasoning +15
Risk20%206060even
Agent interface10%107090Nemotron 3 Nano Omni 30B A3B Reasoning +20
Documentation and upkeep10%104065Nemotron 3 Nano Omni 30B A3B Reasoning +25
Negative events≤1500
TotalC 61/100C 60.7/100

Facts side by side

FactMiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9BNemotron 3 Nano Omni 30B A3B Reasoning
KindOpen-weight modelOpen-weight model
VendorXiaomi (MiMo team)NVIDIA
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthNoneNone
PricingFreeFree
x402nono
LicenceMIT (metadata only, no LICENSE file); built on Qwen3.5-9B under Apache 2.0NVIDIA Open Model Agreement (custom, commercial use allowed, not an OSI licence)
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtnono
Last release2026-09-212026-08-24
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 reviews2.3/5 (4)3/5 (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.

Nemotron 3 Nano Omni 30B A3B Reasoning

A local multimodal cousin for video with speech, long documents, charts, screens and English transcription, with tool calling, a reasoning switch and a 262,144-token context. It needs about 27 GB for NVIDIA's NVFP4 build on Blackwell, or 42 GB for FP8. The main risks are the remote code it loads and a repository where nobody answers questions.

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

Nemotron 3 Nano Omni 30B A3B Reasoning

  1. Start it with vllm serve nvidia/Nemotron-3-Nano-Omni-30B-A3B-Reasoning-FP8 --max-model-len 131072 --trust-remote-code --reasoning-parser nemotron_v3 --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser qwen3_coder --kv-cache-dtype fp8 on vLLM 0.20.0 or later, after pip install "vllm[audio]" if any audio will be sent
  2. Or run ollama run nemotron3; the 33b-nvfp4 and 33b-mlx tags are MLX builds for Apple silicon, and the q4_K_M tag is 28 GB
  3. Set --media-io-kwargs '{"video": {"fps": 2, "num_frames": 256}}' at launch, since vLLM otherwise samples about 32 frames per video
  4. Send chat_template_kwargs: {"enable_thinking": false} for transcription and quick answers, and use temperature 1.0 with top_k 1 for ASR as the card recommends
  5. Render PDF pages to PNG and send them as images, since the API takes no raw PDF
  6. Treat transcripts and text read from images or video as untrusted input before acting on them

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B or Nemotron 3 Nano Omni 30B A3B Reasoning?

MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B and Nemotron 3 Nano Omni 30B A3B Reasoning score within a point of each other on agent readiness, 61 (C) and 60.7 (C). Nemotron 3 Nano Omni 30B A3B Reasoning leads on reach, agent interface and documentation and upkeep.

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