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

MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B vs Qwen3-Omni-30B-A3B-Instruct

MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B scores 61 (C) on agent readiness against Qwen3-Omni-30B-A3B-Instruct's 41.8 (E), and leads in every scored category. 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

  • Reach, 70 against 55
  • Risk, 60 against 55
  • Agent interface, 70 against 60
  • Documentation and upkeep, 40 against 26

Watch for

Only BF16 from Xiaomi, about 23 GB to run

Qwen3-Omni-30B-A3B-Instruct E

Best for Agents on a machine with about 96 GB to spare that need one local model to hear, see and answer by voice

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

Watch for

Only a 70.5 GB BF16 build, about 85 GB to run, with no quantised build from Alibaba

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runMiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9BQwen3-Omni-30B-A3B-InstructEdge
Capability35%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Reach25%257055MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B +15
Risk20%206055MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B +5
Agent interface10%107060MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B +10
Documentation and upkeep10%104026MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B +14
Negative events≤1500
TotalC 61/100E 41.8/100

Facts side by side

FactMiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9BQwen3-Omni-30B-A3B-Instruct
KindOpen-weight modelOpen-weight model
VendorXiaomi (MiMo team)Alibaba (Qwen team)
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
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtnono
Last release2026-09-212025-09-22
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)2/5 (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.

Qwen3-Omni-30B-A3B-Instruct

An omni-modal cousin that listens, watches and reads, then answers in text or one of three voices, with tool calls from spoken requests, under plain Apache 2.0. Its only build, BF16, needs about 85 GB, and speech out needs Transformers or vLLM-Omni. The main risk is no answers from Qwen and no safety work for speech-driven actions.

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

Qwen3-Omni-30B-A3B-Instruct

  1. For text answers, mkdir -p media && vllm serve Qwen/Qwen3-Omni-30B-A3B-Instruct --dtype bfloat16 --max-model-len 32768 --allowed-local-media-path "$(pwd)/media" with vLLM 0.11.1 or later serves the Thinker on an OpenAI-compatible API
  2. The card's command passes --allowed-local-media-path /, which lets anyone who can reach the server have it read any file on the machine through a file:// URL. Point it at a dedicated folder that holds only the media you mean to send, as above, and give vLLM an absolute path
  3. Send audio as audio_url and images as image_url content parts; vLLM serve doesn't take use_audio_in_video, so pass a video's audio separately
  4. For speech out, load Qwen3OmniMoeForConditionalGeneration in Transformers 4.57.0 or later with qwen-omni-utils, pick speaker Ethan, Chelsie or Aiden, and write the returned waveform at 24 kHz
  5. Call model.disable_talker() or pass return_audio=False when you only need text, which saves about 10 GB and time
  6. Parse tool calls as JSON inside <tool_call> tags yourself, since no parser is named, and confirm actions triggered by speech before running them
  7. Keep use_audio_in_video the same across every step of a conversation, the card warns results go wrong otherwise
  8. Budget memory for video, the card's table rises from 78.85 GB for 15 seconds to 144.81 GB for 120 seconds in BF16

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B or Qwen3-Omni-30B-A3B-Instruct?

MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B scores 61 (C) on agent readiness against Qwen3-Omni-30B-A3B-Instruct's 41.8 (E), and leads in every scored category.

Other comparisons with MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B or Qwen3-Omni-30B-A3B-Instruct

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