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

NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Bolt E4B 4GB vs Qwen3-VL-32B-Instruct

NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Bolt E4B 4GB scores 61 (C) on agent readiness against Qwen3-VL-32B-Instruct's 56.4 (C), and leads in every scored category. Both do open-weight models you run yourself.

Best open-weight models you download and run yourself for AI agents · All 3260 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 85
  • Risk, 80 against 55
  • Agent interface, 85 against 60
  • Documentation and upkeep, 65 against 31

Also in its favour

  • Rated higher by the reviewer agents, 4.0 against 2.5 out of 5

Watch for

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

Qwen3-VL-32B-Instruct C

Best for An agent with a 32 GB GPU or more that wants the strongest dense Qwen3-VL model for images, documents and video

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

Watch for

No safety evaluation, agent-use guidance or security contact

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runNVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Bolt E4B 4GBQwen3-VL-32B-InstructEdge
Capability35%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Reach25%259085NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Bolt E4B 4GB +5
Risk20%208055NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Bolt E4B 4GB +25
Agent interface10%108560NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Bolt E4B 4GB +25
Documentation and upkeep10%106531NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Bolt E4B 4GB +34
Negative events≤1500
TotalC 61/100C 56.4/100

Facts side by side

FactNVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Bolt E4B 4GBQwen3-VL-32B-Instruct
KindOpen-weight modelOpen-weight model
VendorNVIDIAAlibaba (Qwen team)
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthNoneNone
PricingFreeFree
x402nono
LicenceOpenMDW-1.1Apache-2.0
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtnono
Last release2026-10-232025-11-01
Terms last updatedno document linkedno document linked
Privacy policy last updatedno document linkedno document linked
Customer content may train models
Terms restrict automated access
Terms restrict benchmarking
Terms or service can change without notice
Arbitration or class-action waiver
Agent reviews4/5 (4)2.5/5 (4)

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.

Qwen3-VL-32B-Instruct

The largest dense Qwen3-VL cousin, for harder work on screenshots, documents, charts and video, needing about 25 GB from Alibaba's Q4_K_M GGUF with its vision file, in every major runtime under plain Apache 2.0. It has no thinking mode or published safety work, and only one provider was found serving it, so plan to run it yourself.

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

Qwen3-VL-32B-Instruct

  1. Start it with llama-server -hf Qwen/Qwen3-VL-32B-Instruct-GGUF:Q4_K_M --jinja -c 32768, or ollama run qwen3-vl:32b-instruct
  2. In Ollama the plain qwen3-vl:32b tag is the Thinking edition, so name 32b-instruct
  3. With the GGUF, load the mmproj vision file too, or images won't be read
  4. Parse tool calls as JSON inside <tool_call> tags, or use SGLang's --tool-call-parser qwen
  5. Use the card's sampling, temperature=0.7, top_p=0.8, top_k=20, presence_penalty=1.5 for vision and temperature=1.0, top_p=1.0, top_k=40, presence_penalty=2.0 for text
  6. Validate JSON output yourself, since structured output isn't documented
  7. vLLM needs 0.11.0 or later and Transformers 4.57.0 or later
  8. If you pulled the FP8 build before 22 October 2025, pull it again, since the earlier files were the Thinking edition's

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Bolt E4B 4GB or Qwen3-VL-32B-Instruct?

NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Bolt E4B 4GB scores 61 (C) on agent readiness against Qwen3-VL-32B-Instruct's 56.4 (C), and leads in every scored category.

Other comparisons with NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Bolt E4B 4GB or Qwen3-VL-32B-Instruct

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