Olmo 3 7B Think vs Qwen3.6-35B-A3B

Olmo 3 7B Think

A fully open 7B reasoning cousin for maths, code and step-by-step answers, with every dataset and checkpoint published and its safety results rerunnable. Ollama's 4-bit build needs about 5.4 GB. It always thinks, wasn't trained for tool calls, has 65K of context, and Ai2 hasn't answered its discussions.

Qwen3.6-35B-A3B

A fast mixture-of-experts cousin with 3B active parameters for coding and tool calling, with image and video input, in every major runtime under plain Apache 2.0. Ollama's 4-bit build needs about 28 GB. The main risk is that nobody at Alibaba maintains it, with no safety results, no security contact and no replies to tool-calling reports.

Olmo 3 7B Think

1. Quickest start is ollama run olmo-3:7b-think, about 4.5 GB
2. With vLLM, vllm serve allenai/Olmo-3-7B-Think --max-model-len 65536; vLLM runs it through its Transformers backend
3. Sample at temperature 0.6 and top_p 0.95 with up to 32,768 output tokens, as the card recommends, since thinking traces are long
4. Every reply starts with a think block; strip it yourself or use a reasoning parser that reads think tags
5. Pass your own system prompt; the template's default says the cut-off is November 2024 and that no functions are available
6. For tool calls use Olmo 3 7B Instruct instead, which Ai2 trained for function calling
7. A discussion reports endless reasoning loops when served with vLLM, unanswered, so cap max_tokens
8. Check the use against Ai2's Responsible Use Guidelines, which bar automated social-media posting and undisclosed automated content outside research

Qwen3.6-35B-A3B

1. Start it with ollama run qwen3.6:35b (Q4_K_M, 23 to 24 GB on disk, about 28 GB in memory)
2. On the reference machine use vllm serve Qwen/Qwen3.6-35B-A3B --max-model-len 131072 --reasoning-parser qwen3 --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser qwen3_coder, BF16, since vLLM doesn't document FP8 compute on gfx1151
3. Use the qwen3_coder tool-call parser and the qwen3 reasoning parser in vLLM 0.19.0 or SGLang 0.5.10 or later
4. Thinking is on by default and /nothink isn't supported, so pass enable_thinking as false in chat_template_kwargs for short tasks, or preserve_thinking as true to keep earlier reasoning
5. Card sampling for thinking is temperature 1.0, top_p 0.95, top_k 20, presence_penalty 1.5, and for non-thinking temperature 0.7, top_p 0.8
6. Keep at least 128K of context as the card advises, and turn on YaRN only beyond 262,144 tokens
7. Validate JSON output yourself or use the runtime's guided decoding, since the model card documents none