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

Nemotron 3.5 Lightning 30B A3B vs occamy-1.0

Nemotron 3.5 Lightning 30B A3B scores 64.2 (B) on agent readiness against occamy-1.0's 61 (C), and leads in 2 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 2870 open weights comparisons

Which one, for what

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 70

Watch for

No safety evaluation results published

occamy-1.0 C

Best for Agents that want an Apache 2.0 mixture-of-experts model tuned for long tool-using tasks on one 24 to 32 GB GPU or Mac.

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

Watch for

No safety results, prompt-injection guidance or security contact

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runNemotron 3.5 Lightning 30B A3Boccamy-1.0Edge
Capability35%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Reach25%258585even
Risk20%207555Nemotron 3.5 Lightning 30B A3B +20
Agent interface10%109070Nemotron 3.5 Lightning 30B A3B +20
Documentation and upkeep10%107074occamy-1.0 +4
Negative events≤1500
TotalB 64.2/100C 61/100

Facts side by side

FactNemotron 3.5 Lightning 30B A3Boccamy-1.0
KindOpen-weight modelOpen-weight model
VendorNVIDIAAccio (Accio-Lab)
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthNoneNone
PricingFreeFree
x402nono
LicenceOpenMDW-1.1Apache-2.0
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtnono
Last release2026-08-112026-10-02
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 reviews3/5 (4)3/5 (4)

Verdicts

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.

occamy-1.0

A Qwen3.6-35B-A3B fine-tuned for long agent work with tools, files and code, under plain Apache 2.0, and Accio's 4-bit builds run in about 23 GB. The main gaps are no safety results, agent guidance or security contact, and every benchmark figure is Accio's own.

Before you call either

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

occamy-1.0

  1. Serve with --reasoning-parser qwen3 --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser qwen3_coder on vLLM 0.19.0 or SGLang 0.5.10 and later
  2. BF16 is 70.2 GB, so on a 128 GB machine run it without the card's 8-way tensor parallelism
  3. Keep the whole assistant message, reasoning and tool calls included, in later turns, as the card says
  4. Sampling per the card is temperature 1.0, top_p 0.95, top_k 20 and presence_penalty 1.5
  5. With the GGUFs, NFC-normalise input text and read TOKENIZER.md, since the files store qwen2 pre-tokenizer metadata
  6. The base's MTP layer isn't in this checkpoint, Accio-Lab/occamy-1.0-MTP is an experimental separate head

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, Nemotron 3.5 Lightning 30B A3B or occamy-1.0?

Nemotron 3.5 Lightning 30B A3B scores 64.2 (B) on agent readiness against occamy-1.0's 61 (C), and leads in 2 of 4 scored categories.

Other comparisons with Nemotron 3.5 Lightning 30B A3B or occamy-1.0

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