Nanbeige4.3-33B vs SmolLM3-3B

Nanbeige4.3-33B

A dense 33B Llama-architecture cousin for long agentic coding and office tasks, with per-request thinking, XML tool calls that stock vLLM and SGLang parse, and 512K of context. It needs about 96 GB at BF16, as Nanbeige ships no quantised build. Its agentic results so far are Nanbeige's own, with no safety results, training data notes or licence file.

SmolLM3-3B

A tiny, fully open cousin with documented tool calling and switchable thinking, for local subtasks and routing on laptops and CPUs. It needs about 8 GB in BF16, or under 3 GB in Hugging Face's 4-bit ONNX build for ONNX Runtime. The main risks are a 64K native context, no safety results and no repository changes since September 2025.

Nanbeige4.3-33B

1. Serve with vllm serve Nanbeige/Nanbeige4.3-33B --enable-auto-tool-choice --reasoning-parser qwen3 --tool-call-parser qwen3_coder, as the card says, or SGLang with the same two parsers
2. Keep tool_call_format at its default xml, since qwen3_coder parses that format; the json option writes Hermes-style JSON calls, which need a different parser such as vLLM's hermes
3. Pass chat_template_kwargs {"preserve_thinking": true} for multi-turn tool use and coding, and {"enable_thinking": false} to skip reasoning, as the card recommends
4. Use temperature 1.0, top_p 0.95 and up to 65,536 new tokens for agent work, and temperature 0.6 for reasoning and chat, per the card
5. Send your own system prompt, since without one the template injects a Chinese identity line, or a Chinese tool-expert prompt when tools are passed
6. Send one system message at the start only, as the template raises an error for a later one
7. In plain Transformers pass use_cache=True to generate, since config.json and generation_config.json set it false; trust_remote_code isn't needed

SmolLM3-3B

1. Start it with vllm serve HuggingFaceTB/SmolLM3-3B --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser=hermes, or tool calls come back as text
2. Pass chat_template_kwargs with enable_thinking false for short tasks, since thinking is on by default; a /think or /no_think flag in the system prompt overrides the kwarg
3. Put earlier tool calls in the assistant message content, since the template ignores a tool_calls field when it renders history
4. Add the YaRN rope_scaling block (factor 2.0, original 65536) to config.json before sending more than 65,536 tokens
5. Use temperature 0.6 and top_p 0.95, the card's recommended sampling
6. Needs Transformers v4.53.0 or later; for llama.cpp use a GGUF from ggml-org or another converter, since Hugging Face publishes none
7. Validate JSON output yourself or use the runtime's guided decoding