MiniCPM5-2B vs Qwopus3.8-27B-Flash-V2

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.

Qwopus3.8-27B-Flash-V2

A Qwen3.8-27B cousin tuned to think less per turn in long agent loops, with an MTP head for speculative decoding in llama.cpp. It fits 24 GB with Jackrong's 4-bit GGUF. The risks are one person's experimental release with no safety work, training traces taken from Claude and GPT, and a tool format that differs from Qwen's.

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

Qwopus3.8-27B-Flash-V2

1. Quickest start is llama-server -hf Jackrong/Qwopus3.8-27B-Flash-V2-GGUF:Q4_K_M --jinja, about 17 GB, and add mmproj-F32.gguf for images
2. The card's tests used Q5_K_M with the bundled MTP head and --spec-type draft-mtp in llama.cpp
3. The template asks for tool calls as JSON inside tool_call tags, so use a Hermes-style parser (vLLM's hermes), not Qwen3.8's qwen3_coder
4. For coding the card recommends enable_thinking true, reasoning_effort xhigh and temperature 0.3, which you must pass yourself, since generation_config.json says 1.0
5. reasoning_effort takes xhigh (default), medium or low, and any other value makes the template raise an error
6. Earlier reasoning stays in the context unless preserve_thinking is false
7. Cap max_tokens, since a report says it loops more than V1