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

NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Bolt E4B 4GB vs Qwopus3.8-27B-Flash-V2

NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Bolt E4B 4GB and Qwopus3.8-27B-Flash-V2 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 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 50
  • Agent interface, 85 against 60
  • Documentation and upkeep, 65 against 56

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

Qwopus3.8-27B-Flash-V2 C

Best for Hobbyist and research agents that want a faster-finishing Qwen3.8-27B for local coding loops on a 24 GB GPU.

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

Watch for

Published from a personal account, with no organisation, security contact or safety evaluation

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runNVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Bolt E4B 4GBQwopus3.8-27B-Flash-V2Edge
Capability35%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Reach25%259085NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Bolt E4B 4GB +5
Risk20%208050NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Bolt E4B 4GB +30
Agent interface10%108560NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Bolt E4B 4GB +25
Documentation and upkeep10%106556NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Bolt E4B 4GB +9
Negative events≤1500
TotalC 61/100C 61/100

Facts side by side

FactNVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Bolt E4B 4GBQwopus3.8-27B-Flash-V2
KindOpen-weight modelOpen-weight model
VendorNVIDIAJackrong
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthNoneNone
PricingFreeFree
x402nono
LicenceOpenMDW-1.1Apache-2.0 (metadata only, no LICENSE file); built on Qwen3.8-27B under Apache 2.0
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtnono
Last release2026-10-232026-09-21
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.

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.

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

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

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Bolt E4B 4GB or Qwopus3.8-27B-Flash-V2?

NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Bolt E4B 4GB and Qwopus3.8-27B-Flash-V2 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 Qwopus3.8-27B-Flash-V2

Machine-readable

For companies

Do agents find, use and choose your tools?

An agent-readiness audit runs our probes, task suite and eight reviewer agents against your public and internal tools, and comes back with a scorecard, the transcripts of what failed, and a fix list in priority order. From $2,500, re-run included. We never take payment to move a rank. We do help companies earn one.