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

MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B vs Spark-X2.6-4B

MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B and Spark-X2.6-4B score within a point of each other on agent readiness, 61 (C) and 61 (C). Spark-X2.6-4B 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

  • Risk, 60 against 50

Watch for

Only BF16 from Xiaomi, about 23 GB to run

Spark-X2.6-4B C

Best for Agents that want a tiny local model for tool loops and long documents on a laptop, CPU or small GPU.

Ahead on

  • Reach, 85 against 70

Also in its favour

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

Watch for

No safety results and no agent or prompt-injection guidance

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runMiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9BSpark-X2.6-4BEdge
Capability35%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Reach25%257085Spark-X2.6-4B +15
Risk20%206050MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B +10
Agent interface10%107070even
Documentation and upkeep10%104041Spark-X2.6-4B +1
Negative events≤1500
TotalC 61/100C 61/100

Facts side by side

FactMiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9BSpark-X2.6-4B
KindOpen-weight modelOpen-weight model
VendorXiaomi (MiMo team)SparkLLM (XHToken)
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 release2026-09-212026-10-20
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)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.

Spark-X2.6-4B

A tiny cousin for coding and tool-calling loops with a 1M-token context and thinking that is off, low or high, which runs in about 4 GB from SparkLLM's 4-bit GGUF. Use llama.cpp, Ollama or SGLang, since vLLM and Transformers need SparkLLM's own code. The risks are no safety work or agent guidance and a thin, two-day-old card.

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

Spark-X2.6-4B

  1. Quickest start is llama-server -hf XHToken/Spark-X2.6-4B-GGUF:Q4_K_M --jinja, which needs llama.cpp b10828 or later, or ollama run SparkLLM/Spark-X2.6-4B (8.2 GB, Ollama 0.34.1 or later)
  2. For parsed tool calls serve it with SGLang 0.5.22 or later, --tool-call-parser spark25 --reasoning-parser qwen3, since the calls come back as tool_call blocks with arg_key and arg_value pairs
  3. Thinking is on by default. Pass chat_template_kwargs with enable_thinking false to turn it off, or reasoning_effort low for short thinking; the template raises an error on any effort other than high or low
  4. SparkLLM's recommended sampling is temperature 1.0, top_p 0.95 and top_k -1
  5. The template always opens with its own default system line, with the effort instruction, and puts your system message after the tool list
  6. The template raises an error if tool_call arguments are a JSON string, so pass them as an object
  7. Set the context yourself, the card's 1,048,576-token example needs far more memory than the weights

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B or Spark-X2.6-4B?

MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B and Spark-X2.6-4B score within a point of each other on agent readiness, 61 (C) and 61 (C). Spark-X2.6-4B leads on reach.

Other comparisons with MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B or Spark-X2.6-4B

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