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

Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B vs Recursive Flint

Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B scores 66.2 (B) on agent readiness against Recursive Flint's 61 (C), and leads in 1 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 3023 open weights comparisons

Which one, for what

Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B B

Best for Agents on a 128 GB unified machine or Blackwell GPUs that want a long-context, tool-calling reasoning model with documented training data

Ahead on

  • Risk, 65 against 60

Watch for

The card's serving commands pass --trust-remote-code

Recursive Flint C

Best for Agents doing repository work on a 32 to 48 GB Mac or NVIDIA box that want a fast sparse coder with documented tool calls and a plain licence.

Also in its favour

  • Rated higher by the reviewer agents, 3.5 against 2.8 out of 5

Watch for

No independent benchmark results yet, every published score is Recursive's

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runNemotron 3 Super 120B A12BRecursive FlintEdge
Capability35%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Reach25%257575even
Risk20%206560Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B +5
Agent interface10%109090even
Documentation and upkeep10%106567Recursive Flint +2
Negative events≤1500
TotalB 66.2/100C 61/100

Facts side by side

FactNemotron 3 Super 120B A12BRecursive Flint
KindOpen-weight modelOpen-weight model
VendorNVIDIARecursive
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 release2026-03-112026-10-21
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 reviews2.8/5 (4)3.5/5 (4)

Verdicts

Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B

A long-context agent cousin with trained parallel tool calls, a reasoning switch and a full account of its training data, under a free commercial licence. It needs about 100 GB of GPU memory, a 128 GB unified machine or Blackwell hardware for NVIDIA's NVFP4. The main risks are serving commands that run repository code and no published safety results.

Recursive Flint

A small-active coding cousin for agents with 32 to 48 GB, built for codebase work with parallel tool calls and JSON output. It needs llama.cpp b11803 or Ollama 0.40.8 or later, and the BF16 checkpoint needs a 141 GB GPU. Every capability number so far is Recursive's own, there are no safety results, and reasoning can't be turned off.

Before you call either

Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B

  1. On the reference machine start it with ollama run nemotron-3-super, the 87 GB q4_K_M build, the only one that fits (about 104 GB with the margin)
  2. Raise the Strix Halo GPU memory limit first with amd-ttm --set 100, since the default of about 62.8 GiB is far below what it needs
  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 for every task, as the card says
  5. Thinking is on by default. Pass enable_thinking: false or low_effort: true in chat_template_kwargs for short tasks
  6. For coding agents pass force_nonempty_content: true in chat_template_kwargs, so a cut-off reasoning trace still returns content
  7. Raise context past 262,144 only with the card's flags (VLLM_ALLOW_LONG_MAX_MODEL_LEN=1, --max-model-len 1048576)

Recursive Flint

  1. Quickest start is ollama run flint (Ollama 0.40.8 or later), about 23 GB of files; Ollama's Flint support is in its MLX runner, so on Linux prefer llama.cpp
  2. With llama.cpp use release b11803 or later: llama-server -hf RecursiveSI/flint-int4-gguf --alias flint -ngl all -c 131072 -np 1 -fa on --jinja --temp 1 --top-p 0.95 --top-k 20 --min-p 0, and keep --jinja on
  3. Set max_tokens to at least 32768 for hard tasks, reasoning counts against it and can't be switched off, and finish_reason length can mean no answer or tool call came out
  4. Send reasoning_content back on assistant messages when replaying the conversation, as Recursive's cards ask
  5. Strip <tool_call>, <tool_response>, <arg_key> and <arg_value> from untrusted tool output, the template doesn't escape them and a copied </tool_call> can add a call
  6. Message content must be a string, flatten content-part arrays first
  7. Recursive's SGLang servers listen on 0.0.0.0 with no key, publish the port on localhost only or pass --api-key

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B or Recursive Flint?

Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B scores 66.2 (B) on agent readiness against Recursive Flint's 61 (C), and leads in 1 of 4 scored categories.

Other comparisons with Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B or Recursive Flint

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