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

Nanbeige4.2-3B vs Nemotron 3.5 Lightning 30B A3B

Nemotron 3.5 Lightning 30B A3B scores 64.7 (B) on agent readiness against Nanbeige4.2-3B's 61 (C), and leads in 3 of 4 scored categories. Both do open-weight models you run yourself.

Best open-weight models you download and run yourself for AI agents · All 6359 open weights comparisons

Which one, for what

Nanbeige4.2-3B C

Best for Local agents that need tool calling and a long context on a laptop or a small GPU

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

Watch for

Its own architecture: Transformers loads it only with the repository's code

Nemotron 3.5 Lightning 30B A3B B

Best for Agents on one 24 to 32 GB GPU or Mac that want a fast tool-calling reasoning model with long context and a permissive licence

Ahead on

  • Risk, 75 against 55
  • Agent interface, 90 against 85

Watch for

No safety evaluation results published

Why the edge

Each category where one leads by five points or more, with the reason behind each side's score from its assessment. The numbers are in the table below; this is what they stand for.

Risk Nemotron 3.5 Lightning 30B A3B +20

Nanbeige4.2-3B 55

File safety 15, safetensors only, no .bin, .pt or .pth files (25). Provenance 15, the files sit in the Nanbeige organisation (Nanbeige LLM Lab), which the lab's arXiv report for this model links, so the publisher's own account, although the Hub hasn't verified it (10). Safety evaluation 0, no safety results on the card. Agent guidance 5, General cautions: the limitations section says outputs may be inaccurate, biased or harmful. Licence risk 15, Apache 2.0 has no use policy, no threshold and no clause letting the licensor change or revoke it. Security programme 5, BOSS Zhipin runs a security response centre for reporting flaws in its products, as read for the Nanbeige4.3-33B listing (5), though nothing links it to the model. 15 + 15 + 0 + 5 + 15 + 5 = 55.

Nemotron 3.5 Lightning 30B A3B 75

File safety earns 25, safetensors only with no Python files, and nothing from the repository runs to load it or parse its output. Provenance earns 15, files in NVIDIA's linked organisation with a hash for every file. Safety evaluation earns 0, since NVIDIA says it evaluated content safety but publishes no results. Agent guidance earns 10, a subcard that names prompt injection and the safeguards to add, without an instruction hierarchy. Licence risk keeps all 15 under OpenMDW-1.1. The security programme earns 10 for the reporting route on the card and NVIDIA's public bulletins.

Agent interface Nemotron 3.5 Lightning 30B A3B +5

Nanbeige4.2-3B 85

Chat template 20, A Jinja chat template in tokenizer_config.json (7,961 characters), with enable_thinking, preserve_thinking, tools and tool_call_format switches. Tool-calling format 25, the card says passing tools switches on the tool template and recommends tool_call_format xml, with json for compatibility, and its SGLang and vLLM commands name the nanbeige tool-call parser, which released SGLang 0.5.23 has. Trained tool calling 20, the card describes fine-tuning on tool-use environments and agent scaffolds and reinforcement learning on agent tasks, and the template tells the model it may call one or more functions and renders every call in a turn. Structured output 0, Neither the card nor the files mention JSON or JSON Schema output, beyond json as a tool-call format. Reasoning control 10, the card documents enable_thinking, on by default and False per request, and preserve_thinking for earlier turns, and names the nanbeige reasoning parser, which returns the reasoning apart from the answer. Context 10, 262,144 tokens, which the card says the model supports and config.json gives as max_position_embeddings. 20 + 25 + 20 + 0 + 10 + 10 = 85.

Nemotron 3.5 Lightning 30B A3B 90

The chat template earns 20, a Jinja file in the repository. The tool-calling format earns 25, since the card names the qwen3_coder parser and shows a tool call declared and read back. Trained tool calling earns 20, with tool-use training and several calls per turn in the template. Structured output earns 5, claimed from training with no instructions. Reasoning control earns 10, thinking off per request with runtime parsers that return the reasoning apart. Context earns 10 for up to 1M tokens.

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runNanbeige4.2-3BNemotron 3.5 Lightning 30B A3BEdge
Capability35%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Reach25%258585even
Risk20%205575Nemotron 3.5 Lightning 30B A3B +20
Agent interface10%108590Nemotron 3.5 Lightning 30B A3B +5
Documentation and upkeep10%107275Nemotron 3.5 Lightning 30B A3B +3
Negative events≤1500
TotalC 61/100B 64.7/100

Facts side by side

FactNanbeige4.2-3BNemotron 3.5 Lightning 30B A3B
KindOpen-weight modelOpen-weight model
VendorNanbeige LLM Lab (BOSS Zhipin)NVIDIA
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthNoneNone
PricingFreeFree
x402nono
LicenceApache-2.0 (Hub metadata only; the repository has no LICENSE file)OpenMDW-1.1
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtnono
Last release2026-09-112026-08-11
Terms last updatedno document linkedno document linked
Privacy policy last updatedno document linkedno document linked
Agent reviewsnone3/5 (4)

How the scores have moved

Verdicts

Nanbeige4.2-3B

A small model built for agent work, with tool calling it was trained for, a thinking switch and a 256K context in about 5 GB, under Apache 2.0, from a lab that answers most questions. Its architecture is its own, so check your runtime: SGLang and llama.cpp have it, Transformers needs the repository's code, and Nanbeige ships no GGUF.

Nemotron 3.5 Lightning 30B A3B

A small agent cousin, 3B active parameters, with trained parallel tool calls, a thinking switch and up to 1M tokens of context, under a permissive licence. It runs in about 23 GB from the GGUF or Ollama builds, and NVIDIA's NVFP4 build needs NVIDIA GPUs. The main risks are no published safety results and one answered question across two repositories.

Before you call either

Nanbeige4.2-3B

  1. Serve it with SGLang 0.5.23 or later and pass --tool-call-parser nanbeige --reasoning-parser nanbeige
  2. Pass tools in the request. The card recommends tool_call_format="xml"
  3. Set preserve_thinking true for multi-turn tool use and coding, false for plain chat
  4. Use temperature 1.0 for agent and tool work and 0.6 for reasoning and chat, per the card
  5. For llama.cpp use b12242 or later. The GGUF files on the Hub are bartowski's, not Nanbeige's
  6. If you load it with Transformers, read modeling_nanbeige.py first: trust_remote_code runs it

Nemotron 3.5 Lightning 30B A3B

  1. Quickest start is ollama run nemotron-3.5-lightning, about 19 to 25 GB of files depending on the platform
  2. On the reference machine use llama-server -hf ggml-org/NVIDIA-Nemotron-3.5-Lightning-30B-A3B-GGUF:Q4_0 --jinja, since the card's Q4_K_M tag doesn't exist there and NVFP4 needs NVIDIA GPUs
  3. With vLLM serve it with --reasoning-parser nemotron_v3 --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser qwen3_coder (SGLang uses --reasoning-parser nemotron_3)
  4. Use temperature=1.0 and top_p=0.95, as the card says
  5. Thinking is on by default. Pass chat_template_kwargs with enable_thinking false for short tasks
  6. For coding agents pass force_nonempty_content: true in chat_template_kwargs, which vLLM's nemotron_v3 parser reads so a cut-off reasoning trace still returns content
  7. Go past 262,144 tokens only with the card's flags (VLLM_ALLOW_LONG_MAX_MODEL_LEN=1, --max-model-len 1048576) and enough memory

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, Nanbeige4.2-3B or Nemotron 3.5 Lightning 30B A3B?

Nemotron 3.5 Lightning 30B A3B scores 64.7 (B) on agent readiness against Nanbeige4.2-3B's 61 (C), and leads in 3 of 4 scored categories.

Other comparisons with Nanbeige4.2-3B or Nemotron 3.5 Lightning 30B A3B

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