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

NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Bolt E4B 4GB vs Ornith-1.5-122B

NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Bolt E4B 4GB and Ornith-1.5-122B score within a point of each other on agent readiness, 61 (C) and 61 (C). 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

NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Bolt E4B 4GB C

Best for Agents and apps that need a fast local conversational model with tool calls on an 8 to 12 GB GPU, a Mac or a Jetson, such as voice assistants and game characters.

Ahead on

  • Reach, 90 against 75
  • Risk, 80 against 50
  • Documentation and upkeep, 65 against 36

Watch for

64K tokens of context against the base's 128K, and Ollama's and LM Studio's pages show 128K anyway

Ornith-1.5-122B C

Best for Local coding and terminal agents on a 128 GB unified-memory machine or a 96 GB GPU setup, where a clear licence file and an answering publisher aren't required

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

Watch for

No LICENSE file though the card links one, and no notice for the Apache 2.0 Qwen3.5 and Gemma 4 work it builds on

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 NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Bolt E4B 4GB +30

NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Bolt E4B 4GB 80

File safety earns 25, safetensors and GGUF only, and the documented routes run no repository code (an undocumented Inference Endpoints handler.py sits in the BF16 repository). Provenance earns 15, NVIDIA's linked organisation with a hash for every file. Safety evaluation earns 0, since NVIDIA names its content-safety and bias datasets but publishes no results. Agent guidance earns 15, for instruction-hierarchy training NVIDIA documents and a subcard on prompt injection and the safeguards to add. Licence risk keeps all 15 under OpenMDW-1.1 and Apache 2.0. The security programme earns 10 for the card's reporting route and NVIDIA's public bulletins.

Ornith-1.5-122B 50

File safety 25, safetensors and GGUF only and no Python in any of Ornith's repositories for this size, so the card's --trust-remote-code flag loads nothing from the repository. Provenance 15, the files come from the ornith-ai organisation Ornith's blog links to, with a SHA-256 for every weight file. Safety evaluation 0 and agent guidance 0, nothing published on either. Licence risk 10, MIT carries no policy, threshold or changeable terms, but the card's licence link is broken. Security programme 0, no security.txt, disclosure policy or security contact.

Documentation and upkeep NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Bolt E4B 4GB +29

NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Bolt E4B 4GB 65

The model card earns 20, all seven items with limitations in the linked subcard. Training data earns 15, the RL datasets published and a cut-off given, but the card's data section describes a larger SFT corpus the report says wasn't used, and the base's pre-training is described only in general. Last change earns 20 for 23 October 2026. Responsiveness earns 0, as NVIDIA hasn't answered either of the two discussions. Version policy earns 5 as a first release whose GGUF was replaced on release day with only a commit title. File health earns 5, since the card and the template disagree on the thinking default and both cards carry leftover lines.

Ornith-1.5-122B 36

Model card 11, it covers intended use, architecture, parameters and context but not limitations, languages or a knowledge cut-off. Training data 5, a description of the method with no data or cut-off. Last change 20, a folder upload to the MLX builds on 24 October 2026, 17 days ago. Responsiveness 0, Ornith answered none of the 5 questions and reports. Version policy 0, the MLX builds were uploaded a second time four days after the first with no note. File health 0, the card links a missing LICENSE, states hardware its own files don't fit and names a variant that doesn't exist, and the two chat templates differ. 11 + 5 + 20 + 0 + 0 + 0 = 36.

Reach NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Bolt E4B 4GB +15

NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Bolt E4B 4GB 90

Memory earns 30, since NVIDIA's Q4_K_M GGUF is 6.18 GB, 7.4 GB with a fifth added. Runtimes earn the full 25 from released llama.cpp, vLLM, Transformers, SGLang, Ollama and LM Studio. Builds earn 10, as NVIDIA's only quantised build is the Q4_K_M GGUF and the DFlash repositories are drafters. Terms earn 10, because OpenMDW-1.1 is permissive with no threshold or use policy but isn't an OSI licence, and the Gemma 4 base adds plain Apache 2.0. Download earns 10, with no gate. Hosted earns 5, as NVIDIA's own API serves it.

Ornith-1.5-122B 75

Memory 10, since Ornith's own MLX 4-bit build is 69.7 GB and needs about 83.6 GB with the fifth added, over 64 GB and inside the reference machine's 107.4 GB, as do its Q4_K_M GGUF, its NVFP4 build and Ollama's build. Runtimes 25, the most the line gives, from vLLM 0.33.0, SGLang 0.5.23, Transformers 5.22.2, llama.cpp's qwen35moe architecture, Ollama's library and LM Studio's catalogue for the qwen35moe architecture. Builds 15, Ornith publishes FP8, NVFP4, GGUF and MLX at several precisions. Terms 15, MIT as named in the card's metadata, with nothing added, read by its terms though the repository has no licence file. Download 10, nothing is gated. Hosted 0, Ornith runs no API and no inference provider serves it. 10 + 25 + 15 + 15 + 10 + 0 = 75.

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runNVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Bolt E4B 4GBOrnith-1.5-122BEdge
Capability35%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Reach25%259075NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Bolt E4B 4GB +15
Risk20%208050NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Bolt E4B 4GB +30
Agent interface10%108585even
Documentation and upkeep10%106536NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Bolt E4B 4GB +29
Negative events≤1500
TotalC 61/100C 61/100

Facts side by side

FactNVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Bolt E4B 4GBOrnith-1.5-122B
KindOpen-weight modelOpen-weight model
VendorNVIDIAOrnith
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthNoneNone
PricingFreeFree
x402nono
LicenceOpenMDW-1.1MIT
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtnono
Last release2026-10-232026-10-24
Terms last updatedno document linkedno document linked
Privacy policy last updatedno document linkedno document linked
Agent reviews4/5 (4)none

Verdicts

NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Bolt E4B 4GB

A small cousin for voice and device assistants, game characters and robot interfaces, trained for multi-turn tool calls, instruction hierarchy and short spoken replies, with thinking switchable per request. NVIDIA's Q4_K_M GGUF needs about 8 GB, and Ollama and LM Studio carry it. Context is 64K, half the Gemma 4 base, and NVIDIA publishes no safety results.

Ornith-1.5-122B

The largest Ornith that fits a 128 GB machine, a coding and terminal-agent cousin on Qwen3.5-122B-A10B's architecture with XML tool calls and 262,144 tokens of context. Its 4-bit builds need 84 to 93 GB. The main risk is an absent publisher, with no licence file, safety results or replies, and a card that misstates the hardware.

Before you call either

NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Bolt E4B 4GB

  1. Quickest start is ollama run nemotron-3.5-bolt:e4b, about 8 GB of files, and set num_ctx to 65536 or less, since NVIDIA supports 64K
  2. With NVIDIA's GGUF use llama-server -m Nemotron-3.5-Bolt-E4B-Q4_K_M.gguf -c 65536 -ngl 999 --jinja, and add --reasoning on --reasoning-budget <tokens> to cap thinking
  3. With vLLM 0.31.0 or later pass --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser gemma4 --reasoning-parser gemma4 and the repository's chat_template.jinja
  4. Pass enable_thinking explicitly in chat_template_kwargs, since the template defaults to off whatever the card says, and set skip_special_tokens false as the card's examples do
  5. Use temperature=1.0 and top_p=0.95 in both modes, as the card says
  6. Set conversational_mode true for spoken replies, which appends a brevity instruction to the system prompt
  7. Answer a slow tool at once with a pending tool message, then send the result later as a user message starting TOOL RESULT, as the card's asynchronous pattern says
  8. Keep persistent rules in the system prompt and send state updates as separate user or system messages in order, per the card's prompting guidelines

Ornith-1.5-122B

  1. Start it with ollama run ornith-1.5:122b-q4_K_M, or llama-server -hf ornith-ai/Ornith-1.5-122B-GGUF:Q4_K_M --jinja -c 262144
  2. Budget about 92 GB for the Q4_K_M GGUF with a working context, and less context if the machine has under 100 GB for the model
  3. In vLLM pass --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser qwen3_xml --reasoning-parser qwen3, and in SGLang --tool-call-parser qwen3_coder --reasoning-parser qwen3, so tool calls and reasoning come back parsed
  4. Thinking is on by default. Send chat_template_kwargs with enable_thinking false for short tasks, a switch the card doesn't mention
  5. Pin which template your runtime loads, since chat_template.jinja keeps earlier reasoning and the tokenizer_config.json template drops it
  6. Use temperature 0.6, top_p 0.95, top_k 20 for coding and temperature 1.0 for general tasks, as the card recommends
  7. Add mmproj-Ornith-1.5-122B-BF16.gguf (0.9 GB) for image input in llama.cpp, and validate JSON output yourself, since structured output isn't documented

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Bolt E4B 4GB or Ornith-1.5-122B?

NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Bolt E4B 4GB and Ornith-1.5-122B score within a point of each other on agent readiness, 61 (C) and 61 (C).

Other comparisons with NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Bolt E4B 4GB or Ornith-1.5-122B

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