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

MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B vs Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B

Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B scores 66.2 (B) on agent readiness against MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B's 61 (C), 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 2870 open weights comparisons

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 Super 120B A12B B

Best for Agents on a 128 GB unified machine or Blackwell GPUs that want a long-context, tool-calling reasoning model with documented training data

Ahead on

  • Reach, 75 against 70
  • Risk, 65 against 60
  • Agent interface, 90 against 70
  • Documentation and upkeep, 65 against 40

Also in its favour

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

Watch for

The card's serving commands pass --trust-remote-code

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runMiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9BNemotron 3 Super 120B A12BEdge
Capability35%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Reach25%257075Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B +5
Risk20%206065Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B +5
Agent interface10%107090Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B +20
Documentation and upkeep10%104065Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B +25
Negative events≤1500
TotalC 61/100B 66.2/100

Facts side by side

FactMiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9BNemotron 3 Super 120B A12B
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 Nemotron Open Model License
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtnono
Last release2026-09-212026-03-11
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.

Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B

A long-context agent cousin with trained parallel tool calls, a reasoning switch and a full account of its training data, under a free commercial licence. It needs about 100 GB of GPU memory, a 128 GB unified machine or Blackwell hardware for NVIDIA's NVFP4. The main risks are serving commands that run repository code and no published 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

Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B

  1. On the reference machine start it with ollama run nemotron-3-super, the 87 GB q4_K_M build, the only one that fits (about 104 GB with the margin)
  2. Raise the Strix Halo GPU memory limit first with amd-ttm --set 100, since the default of about 62.8 GiB is far below what it needs
  3. With vLLM serve it with --reasoning-parser nemotron_v3 --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser qwen3_coder (SGLang uses --reasoning-parser nemotron_3)
  4. Use temperature=1.0 and top_p=0.95 for every task, as the card says
  5. Thinking is on by default. Pass enable_thinking: false or low_effort: true in chat_template_kwargs for short tasks
  6. For coding agents pass force_nonempty_content: true in chat_template_kwargs, so a cut-off reasoning trace still returns content
  7. Raise context past 262,144 only with the card's flags (VLLM_ALLOW_LONG_MAX_MODEL_LEN=1, --max-model-len 1048576)

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B or Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B?

Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B scores 66.2 (B) on agent readiness against MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B's 61 (C), and leads in every scored category.

Other comparisons with MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B or Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B

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