MiniCPM5-2B vs Nemotron 3 Nano Omni 30B A3B Reasoning

MiniCPM5-2B

A tiny dense cousin for local tool calling and long context, with published training data and an active publisher. OpenBMB's own 4-bit builds need about 2 GB, so it runs on a laptop or phone in vLLM, SGLang, llama.cpp, Ollama or Transformers. The main risks are always-on thinking, no safety results and use conditions beyond Apache 2.0.

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.

MiniCPM5-2B

1. Smallest start is ollama run openbmb/minicpm5-2b (1.6 GB, q4_k_m)
2. On vLLM 0.29.0 or later run vllm serve openbmb/MiniCPM5-2B --max-model-len 131072 --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser minicpm5, or tool calls come back as XML text
3. On SGLang 0.5.16 or later add --tool-call-parser minicpm5 --reasoning-parser qwen3; SGLang is OpenBMB's recommended backend for tool calls
4. Tool calls are XML, <function name=...><param name=...>, not Hermes JSON
5. Sample with temperature 1.0, top_p 0.95 and min_p 0.0; llama.cpp's default min_p 0.05 can loop, and repetition_penalty 1.05 helps if it does
6. Expect a <think> block before every answer and leave room in max_tokens; enable_thinking false is accepted by the template but OpenBMB doesn't support it for the 2B
7. Validate JSON yourself or use the runtime's guided decoding, since structured output isn't documented
8. Use the main repository's template; the GGUF, MLX and GPTQ copies predate the 29 September fix

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