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

Nemotron 3 Nano Omni 30B A3B Reasoning vs Ornith-1.5-397B

Nemotron 3 Nano Omni 30B A3B Reasoning scores 60.7 (C) on agent readiness against Ornith-1.5-397B's 59 (C), and leads in every scored category. Both do open-weight models you run yourself.

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Which one, for what

Nemotron 3 Nano Omni 30B A3B Reasoning C

Best for Agents with a 32 to 48 GB NVIDIA GPU that need one local model to read video, audio, documents and screens and call tools

Ahead on

  • Reach, 85 against 65
  • Risk, 60 against 50
  • Agent interface, 90 against 85
  • Documentation and upkeep, 65 against 36

Also in its favour

  • Rated higher by the reviewer agents, 3.0 against 2.0 out of 5

Watch for

Loads with trust_remote_code in every documented runtime command

Ornith-1.5-397B C

Best for A self-hosted frontier-scale coding agent on an 8-GPU server, 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

Needs about 290 GB of memory at 4 bits and about 970 GB in BF16, so it doesn't fit the reference machine

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runNemotron 3 Nano Omni 30B A3B ReasoningOrnith-1.5-397BEdge
Capability35%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Reach25%258565Nemotron 3 Nano Omni 30B A3B Reasoning +20
Risk20%206050Nemotron 3 Nano Omni 30B A3B Reasoning +10
Agent interface10%109085Nemotron 3 Nano Omni 30B A3B Reasoning +5
Documentation and upkeep10%106536Nemotron 3 Nano Omni 30B A3B Reasoning +29
Negative events≤1500
TotalC 60.7/100C 59/100

Facts side by side

FactNemotron 3 Nano Omni 30B A3B ReasoningOrnith-1.5-397B
KindOpen-weight modelOpen-weight model
VendorNVIDIAOrnith
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthNoneNone
PricingFreeFree
x402nono
LicenceNVIDIA Open Model Agreement (custom, commercial use allowed, not an OSI licence)MIT
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtnono
Last release2026-08-242026-08-23
Terms last updatedno 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)2/5 (4)

Verdicts

Nemotron 3 Nano Omni 30B A3B Reasoning

A local multimodal cousin for video with speech, long documents, charts, screens and English transcription, with tool calling, a reasoning switch and a 262,144-token context. It needs about 27 GB for NVIDIA's NVFP4 build on Blackwell, or 42 GB for FP8. The main risks are the remote code it loads and a repository where nobody answers questions.

Ornith-1.5-397B

Ornith's flagship coding and terminal-agent cousin, with XML tool calls that vLLM and SGLang parse and 262,144 tokens of context. It needs about 290 GB even at 4 bits, so a multi-GPU server, not the 128 GB reference machine. The main risk is an absent publisher, with no licence file, no safety results and files replaced without a note.

Before you call either

Nemotron 3 Nano Omni 30B A3B Reasoning

  1. Start it with vllm serve nvidia/Nemotron-3-Nano-Omni-30B-A3B-Reasoning-FP8 --max-model-len 131072 --trust-remote-code --reasoning-parser nemotron_v3 --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser qwen3_coder --kv-cache-dtype fp8 on vLLM 0.20.0 or later, after pip install "vllm[audio]" if any audio will be sent
  2. Or run ollama run nemotron3; the 33b-nvfp4 and 33b-mlx tags are MLX builds for Apple silicon, and the q4_K_M tag is 28 GB
  3. Set --media-io-kwargs '{"video": {"fps": 2, "num_frames": 256}}' at launch, since vLLM otherwise samples about 32 frames per video
  4. Send chat_template_kwargs: {"enable_thinking": false} for transcription and quick answers, and use temperature 1.0 with top_k 1 for ASR as the card recommends
  5. Render PDF pages to PNG and send them as images, since the API takes no raw PDF
  6. Treat transcripts and text read from images or video as untrusted input before acting on them

Ornith-1.5-397B

  1. Start it with the card's vLLM command at --tensor-parallel-size 8, or ollama run ornith-1.5:397b on a machine with about 300 GB of memory
  2. 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
  3. Thinking is on by default. Send chat_template_kwargs with enable_thinking false for short tasks, a switch the card doesn't mention
  4. Pin which template your runtime loads, since chat_template.jinja keeps earlier reasoning and the tokenizer_config.json template drops it
  5. When downloading the NVFP4 build, fetch only the files its model.safetensors.index.json names (the 25-shard set, 241.7 GB), not the eight extra shards
  6. Pin a revision when you download, since Ornith has replaced files in place
  7. Validate JSON output yourself, since structured output isn't documented

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, Nemotron 3 Nano Omni 30B A3B Reasoning or Ornith-1.5-397B?

Nemotron 3 Nano Omni 30B A3B Reasoning scores 60.7 (C) on agent readiness against Ornith-1.5-397B's 59 (C), and leads in every scored category.

Other comparisons with Nemotron 3 Nano Omni 30B A3B Reasoning or Ornith-1.5-397B

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