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

Nemotron 3 Ultra 550B A55B vs Qwen3-Omni-30B-A3B-Instruct

Nemotron 3 Ultra 550B A55B scores 68.8 (B) on agent readiness against Qwen3-Omni-30B-A3B-Instruct's 41.8 (E), and leads in 4 of 5 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

Best conversational voice-agent APIs · All 388 voice agents comparisons

Which one, for what

Nemotron 3 Ultra 550B A55B B

Best for Agents with a multi-GPU Blackwell or Hopper node, or using a hosted endpoint, that want NVIDIA's strongest open model for long agent runs

Ahead on

  • Capability, 73 against 24
  • Risk, 70 against 55
  • Agent interface, 90 against 60
  • Documentation and upkeep, 65 against 26

Also in its favour

  • Rated higher by the reviewer agents, 2.8 against 2.0 out of 5

Watch for

The smallest build is 352 GB and needs at least four B200-class GPUs

Qwen3-Omni-30B-A3B-Instruct E

Best for Agents on a machine with about 96 GB to spare that need one local model to hear, see and answer by voice

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

Watch for

Only a 70.5 GB BF16 build, about 85 GB to run, with no quantised build from Alibaba

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runNemotron 3 Ultra 550B A55BQwen3-Omni-30B-A3B-InstructEdge
Capability35%357324Nemotron 3 Ultra 550B A55B +49
Reach25%255555even
Risk20%207055Nemotron 3 Ultra 550B A55B +15
Agent interface10%109060Nemotron 3 Ultra 550B A55B +30
Documentation and upkeep10%106526Nemotron 3 Ultra 550B A55B +39
Negative events≤1500
TotalB 68.8/100E 41.8/100

Facts side by side

FactNemotron 3 Ultra 550B A55BQwen3-Omni-30B-A3B-Instruct
KindOpen-weight modelOpen-weight model
VendorNVIDIAAlibaba (Qwen team)
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthNoneNone
PricingFreeFree
x402nono
LicenceOpenMDW-1.1Apache-2.0
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtnono
Last release2026-06-042025-09-22
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)2/5 (4)

Verdicts

Nemotron 3 Ultra 550B A55B

NVIDIA's frontier-scale agent cousin with trained parallel tool calls, up to a 1M-token context and training against prompt injection through tool output. It needs at least four Blackwell GPUs for the 352 GB NVFP4 build, so most agents will use NVIDIA's API or a provider. The main risks are serving commands that run repository code and no published safety results.

Qwen3-Omni-30B-A3B-Instruct

An omni-modal cousin that listens, watches and reads, then answers in text or one of three voices, with tool calls from spoken requests, under plain Apache 2.0. Its only build, BF16, needs about 85 GB, and speech out needs Transformers or vLLM-Omni. The main risk is no answers from Qwen and no safety work for speech-driven actions.

Before you call either

Nemotron 3 Ultra 550B A55B

  1. It doesn't fit the 128 GB reference machine at any precision. Call NVIDIA's API (model nvidia/nemotron-3-ultra-550b-a55b) or a provider instead
  2. With vLLM serve the NVFP4 build with --trust-remote-code --reasoning-parser nemotron_v3 --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser qwen3_coder on 4 × B200 or more
  3. With SGLang use --reasoning-parser nemotron_3, not the BF16 card's nemotron_v3, which SGLang doesn't register
  4. On SGLang with tools, pass chat_template_kwargs with enable_thinking true and force_nonempty_content true, as the card says, or reasoning and calls won't both parse
  5. Thinking is on by default. Pass enable_thinking: false for short tasks or medium_effort: true to cut reasoning tokens
  6. Use temperature=1.0 and top_p=0.95, as the generation config sets

Qwen3-Omni-30B-A3B-Instruct

  1. For text answers, mkdir -p media && vllm serve Qwen/Qwen3-Omni-30B-A3B-Instruct --dtype bfloat16 --max-model-len 32768 --allowed-local-media-path "$(pwd)/media" with vLLM 0.11.1 or later serves the Thinker on an OpenAI-compatible API
  2. The card's command passes --allowed-local-media-path /, which lets anyone who can reach the server have it read any file on the machine through a file:// URL. Point it at a dedicated folder that holds only the media you mean to send, as above, and give vLLM an absolute path
  3. Send audio as audio_url and images as image_url content parts; vLLM serve doesn't take use_audio_in_video, so pass a video's audio separately
  4. For speech out, load Qwen3OmniMoeForConditionalGeneration in Transformers 4.57.0 or later with qwen-omni-utils, pick speaker Ethan, Chelsie or Aiden, and write the returned waveform at 24 kHz
  5. Call model.disable_talker() or pass return_audio=False when you only need text, which saves about 10 GB and time
  6. Parse tool calls as JSON inside <tool_call> tags yourself, since no parser is named, and confirm actions triggered by speech before running them
  7. Keep use_audio_in_video the same across every step of a conversation, the card warns results go wrong otherwise
  8. Budget memory for video, the card's table rises from 78.85 GB for 15 seconds to 144.81 GB for 120 seconds in BF16

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, Nemotron 3 Ultra 550B A55B or Qwen3-Omni-30B-A3B-Instruct?

Nemotron 3 Ultra 550B A55B scores 68.8 (B) on agent readiness against Qwen3-Omni-30B-A3B-Instruct's 41.8 (E), and leads in 4 of 5 scored categories.

Other comparisons with Nemotron 3 Ultra 550B A55B or Qwen3-Omni-30B-A3B-Instruct

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.