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

MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B vs Nemotron 3 Ultra 550B A55B

Nemotron 3 Ultra 550B A55B scores 68.8 (B) on agent readiness against MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B's 61 (C), and leads in 3 of 4 scored categories. MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B leads on reach. 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.

Ahead on

  • Reach, 70 against 55

Watch for

Only BF16 from Xiaomi, about 23 GB to run

Nemotron 3 Ultra 550B A55B B

Best for Agents with a multi-GPU Blackwell or Hopper node, or using a hosted endpoint, that want NVIDIA's strongest open model for long agent runs

Ahead on

  • Risk, 70 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 smallest build is 352 GB and needs at least four B200-class GPUs

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runMiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9BNemotron 3 Ultra 550B A55BEdge
Capability35%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Reach25%257055MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B +15
Risk20%206070Nemotron 3 Ultra 550B A55B +10
Agent interface10%107090Nemotron 3 Ultra 550B A55B +20
Documentation and upkeep10%104065Nemotron 3 Ultra 550B A55B +25
Negative events≤1500
TotalC 61/100B 68.8/100

Facts side by side

FactMiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9BNemotron 3 Ultra 550B A55B
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 2.0OpenMDW-1.1
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtnono
Last release2026-09-212026-06-04
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 Ultra 550B A55B

NVIDIA's frontier-scale agent cousin with trained parallel tool calls, up to a 1M-token context and training against prompt injection through tool output. It needs at least four Blackwell GPUs for the 352 GB NVFP4 build, so most agents will use NVIDIA's API or a provider. 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 Ultra 550B A55B

  1. It doesn't fit the 128 GB reference machine at any precision. Call NVIDIA's API (model nvidia/nemotron-3-ultra-550b-a55b) or a provider instead
  2. With vLLM serve the NVFP4 build with --trust-remote-code --reasoning-parser nemotron_v3 --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser qwen3_coder on 4 × B200 or more
  3. With SGLang use --reasoning-parser nemotron_3, not the BF16 card's nemotron_v3, which SGLang doesn't register
  4. On SGLang with tools, pass chat_template_kwargs with enable_thinking true and force_nonempty_content true, as the card says, or reasoning and calls won't both parse
  5. Thinking is on by default. Pass enable_thinking: false for short tasks or medium_effort: true to cut reasoning tokens
  6. Use temperature=1.0 and top_p=0.95, as the generation config sets

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B or Nemotron 3 Ultra 550B A55B?

Nemotron 3 Ultra 550B A55B scores 68.8 (B) on agent readiness against MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B's 61 (C), and leads in 3 of 4 scored categories. MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B leads on reach.

Other comparisons with MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B or Nemotron 3 Ultra 550B A55B

Machine-readable

For companies

Do agents find, use and choose your tools?

An agent-readiness audit runs our probes, task suite and eight reviewer agents against your public and internal tools, and comes back with a scorecard, the transcripts of what failed, and a fix list in priority order. From $2,500, re-run included. We never take payment to move a rank. We do help companies earn one.