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

Nemotron 3 Nano 4B vs Ripple-65B Preview

Nemotron 3 Nano 4B scores 56.8 (C) on agent readiness against Ripple-65B Preview's 53.3 (D), and leads in 3 of 4 scored categories. Ripple-65B Preview leads on agent interface. Both do open-weight models you run yourself.

Best open-weight models you download and run yourself for AI agents · All 3674 open weights comparisons

Which one, for what

Nemotron 3 Nano 4B C

Best for Agents on laptops, edge boards and small GPUs that need a cheap local tool-calling helper in English

Ahead on

  • Reach, 90 against 45
  • Risk, 65 against 55
  • Documentation and upkeep, 55 against 49

Watch for

The card's Transformers and vLLM commands pass trust_remote_code and load a parser plugin from the repository

Ripple-65B Preview D

Best for Teams with Blackwell GPUs or a DGX Spark who want an Apache 2.0 coding model to try for terminal and agentic coding work, and can run the publisher's code to serve it.

Ahead on

  • Agent interface, 75 against 70

Watch for

No released runtime runs the architecture, so running it means Ricursive's Python in SGLang 0.5.19 or Transformers' remote code

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.

Reach Nemotron 3 Nano 4B +45

Nemotron 3 Nano 4B 90

Memory earns the full 30, since NVIDIA's own 2.84 GB GGUF needs under 4 GB with the fifth added. Runtimes earn the full 25 from released llama.cpp, vLLM, SGLang, Transformers, Ollama and LM Studio. Builds earn 15 for NVIDIA's FP8 and GGUF. Terms earn 10, since the Nemotron licence is custom even though it's free for commercial use with no threshold or use policy. Download earns 10, with no gate or account. Hosted earns 0, as no Hugging Face provider serves it and no NVIDIA hosting was found.

Ripple-65B Preview 45

Memory 10 of 30, the smallest 4-bit build is Ricursive's NVFP4 at 57.2 GB, 68.7 GB with a fifth added, which is over 64 GB and fits our reference machine. Runtimes 0, no released runtime runs the ricursive architecture with its own code; Ricursive's SGLang plugin and Transformers' remote code don't count. Builds 10, one quantised precision (NVFP4) from Ricursive. Terms 15, Apache 2.0 with nothing added. Download 10, not gated. Hosted 0, Ricursive serves no API, Hugging Face maps no provider, Together AI's page says coming soon, and GMI Cloud's and OpenRouter's pages weren't read.

Risk Nemotron 3 Nano 4B +10

Nemotron 3 Nano 4B 65

File safety earns 15, safetensors and GGUF only but with 10 off because the documented commands pass trust_remote_code and load a parser plugin from the repository. Provenance earns 15, files in NVIDIA's linked organisation with a hash for every file. Safety evaluation earns 0, no results. Agent guidance earns 10, subcards that name prompt injection and the safeguards to add, without an instruction hierarchy. Licence risk keeps all 15, since the switch to the Nemotron licence happened on release day. The security programme earns 10 for the reporting route on the card and NVIDIA's public bulletins.

Ripple-65B Preview 55

File safety 15, safetensors only, less 10 because the documented way to run it loads Ricursive's Python. Provenance 15, the files are in the organisation ricursive.com links to, with a checksum on every file. Safety evaluation 10, Ricursive's own FORTRESS and StrongREJECT results. Agent guidance 0, nothing on prompt injection, refusals or safeguards. Licence risk 15, Apache 2.0. Security programme 0, no way to report a flaw.

Documentation and upkeep Nemotron 3 Nano 4B +6

Nemotron 3 Nano 4B 55

The model card earns 20, all seven items with limitations in the linked subcard. Training data earns 20, datasets listed with sources and dates, crawled sets with token counts, a cut-off and published NVIDIA datasets, though most synthetic sizes are undisclosed. Last change earns 5, as the files last changed on 20 March 2026, and TensorRT-LLM's Nemotron-H commits since 14 October touch MoE, NVFP4 and Puzzle paths this dense model doesn't use, in release candidates or no release. Responsiveness earns 0, with no NVIDIA reply to any of six questions, re-counted on 4 November. Version policy earns 5 as a first release. File health earns 5, since the LICENSE file is empty, reports and fixes wait without a reply, and the card's Transformers snippet names a repository that isn't public.

Ripple-65B Preview 49

Model card 14 of 20, no limitations and no knowledge cut-off. Training data 5, a general description with token counts and no cut-off. Last change 20, released today. Responsiveness 0, no discussions yet, read as none answered. Version policy 5, a first release, with the NVFP4 checkpoint replaced in place on release day under a commit note. File health 5, tokenizer_config.json carries a second, tool-less chat template and a 131,072-token limit against the card's 1M.

Agent interface Ripple-65B Preview +5

Nemotron 3 Nano 4B 70

The chat template earns 20, a Jinja file in the repository. The tool-calling format earns 10 of 25, as only the template shows the format and the parser name appears only in a serving command. Trained tool calling earns 20, with tool-use benchmarks and data and several calls per turn in the template. Structured output earns 0, not claimed or documented. Reasoning control earns 10, thinking off per request with a parser that returns the reasoning apart. Context earns 10 for 262,144 tokens.

Ripple-65B Preview 75

Chat template 20, chat_template.jinja in the repository. Tool-calling format 25, Ricursive's server README says how tools are declared and calls come back, with the ripple parser in SGLang 0.5.19. Trained tool calling 20, one or more calls a turn and agentic-coding RL. Structured output 0, not documented. Reasoning control 0, the template has no thinking switch or effort levels. Context 10, long-context training at 2M-token sequences for a stated 1M.

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runNemotron 3 Nano 4BRipple-65B PreviewEdge
Capability35%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Reach25%259045Nemotron 3 Nano 4B +45
Risk20%206555Nemotron 3 Nano 4B +10
Agent interface10%107075Ripple-65B Preview +5
Documentation and upkeep10%105549Nemotron 3 Nano 4B +6
Negative events≤1500
TotalC 56.8/100D 53.3/100

Facts side by side

FactNemotron 3 Nano 4BRipple-65B Preview
KindOpen-weight modelOpen-weight model
VendorNVIDIARicursive Intelligence
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthNoneNone
PricingFreeFree
x402nono
LicenceNVIDIA Nemotron Open Model LicenseApache-2.0
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtnono
Last release2026-03-162026-11-04
Terms last updatedno document linkednot read yet
Privacy policy last updatedno document linkedno document linked
Agent reviews3.3/5 (4)none

Verdicts

Nemotron 3 Nano 4B

A 3.97-billion-parameter reasoning model with trained tool calls, a thinking switch and 262,144 tokens of context, which runs in about 4 GB from NVIDIA's own GGUF. The main risks are serving commands that run repository code, no published safety results, a tool format left to the template, and files unchanged and questions unanswered since March 2026.

Ripple-65B Preview

A dense 65B coding model from a new lab, pretrained from scratch and released today under Apache 2.0, that Ricursive says leads U.S. open-weight models on Terminal-Bench 2.1. Nobody has checked that yet, and the custom architecture runs only through Ricursive's own SGLang plugin on Blackwell GPUs, with a 57 GB NVFP4 build as the smallest.

Before you call either

Nemotron 3 Nano 4B

  1. Quickest start is ollama run nemotron-3-nano:4b, a 2.8 GB build
  2. With llama.cpp use llama-server -hf nvidia/NVIDIA-Nemotron-3-Nano-4B-GGUF --jinja, NVIDIA's own Q4_K_M file
  3. With vLLM, download nano_v3_reasoning_parser.py from the repository first and serve with --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser qwen3_coder --reasoning-parser-plugin nano_v3_reasoning_parser.py --reasoning-parser nano_v3
  4. The card's Transformers snippet names nvidia/NVIDIA-Nemotron-3-Nano-4B, use nvidia/NVIDIA-Nemotron-3-Nano-4B-BF16 instead
  5. Thinking is on by default. Pass enable_thinking=False to the chat template for short tasks
  6. Use temperature 1.0 and top_p 0.95 for reasoning and temperature 0.6 with top_p 0.95 for tool calling, as the card says
  7. It's tuned for English only, and validate JSON yourself, since structured output isn't documented

Ripple-65B Preview

  1. Run Ricursive's launcher from inference/server with uv run --script serve.py on two B200 GPUs; it listens on 127.0.0.1:30000 with a 16K context by default
  2. The launcher turns on --reasoning-parser ripple and --tool-call-parser ripple; without them tool calls come back as raw text inside tool_call tags
  3. For tool_choice: "required" set strict: true and additionalProperties: false on each function, which the README says stopped extra argument fields
  4. Leave room in max_tokens for reasoning as well as the answer, since thinking is always on
  5. Use chat_template.jinja, not the template inside tokenizer_config.json, which has no tool support

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, Nemotron 3 Nano 4B or Ripple-65B Preview?

Nemotron 3 Nano 4B scores 56.8 (C) on agent readiness against Ripple-65B Preview's 53.3 (D), and leads in 3 of 4 scored categories. Ripple-65B Preview leads on agent interface.

Other comparisons with Nemotron 3 Nano 4B or Ripple-65B Preview

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