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

Ornith-1.5-122B vs Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B-Instruct

Ornith-1.5-122B scores 61 (C) on agent readiness against Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B-Instruct's 58 (C), and leads in 1 of 4 scored categories. Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B-Instruct leads on reach and risk. Both do open-weight models you run yourself.

Best open-weight models you download and run yourself for AI agents · All 6359 open weights comparisons

Which one, for what

Ornith-1.5-122B C

Best for Local coding and terminal agents on a 128 GB unified-memory machine or a 96 GB GPU setup, where a clear licence file and an answering publisher aren't required

Ahead on

  • Agent interface, 85 against 60

Watch for

No LICENSE file though the card links one, and no notice for the Apache 2.0 Qwen3.5 and Gemma 4 work it builds on

Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B-Instruct C

Best for An agent with 24 GB or more to spare that wants a local reader of images, documents and video with 262,144 tokens of context

Ahead on

  • Reach, 95 against 75
  • Risk, 55 against 50

Watch for

No safety evaluation, agent-use guidance or security contact

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.

Agent interface Ornith-1.5-122B +25

Ornith-1.5-122B 85

Chat template 20, a Jinja file in the repository. Tool-calling format 25, the card shows how tools go in and how calls come back and names the parser for vLLM and SGLang. Trained tool calling 20, Ornith trains it on agent tasks and the template renders several calls in one turn. Structured output 0, not documented or claimed. Reasoning control 10, Ornith's template reads enable_thinking per request and the card says the reasoning comes back in reasoning_content, though the card doesn't name the switch. Context 10, 262,144 tokens native.

Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B-Instruct 60

A Jinja chat template in the repository (20). The tool-call format lives only in the template, Hermes-style JSON in tool_call tags, and Alibaba names no parser (10). Trained for multimodal function calling, with several calls allowed in a turn (20). No documented structured output (0). No thinking mode in this edition, so reasoning control scores 0 by the rule. 262,144 tokens of native context (10).

Reach Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B-Instruct +20

Ornith-1.5-122B 75

Memory 10, since Ornith's own MLX 4-bit build is 69.7 GB and needs about 83.6 GB with the fifth added, over 64 GB and inside the reference machine's 107.4 GB, as do its Q4_K_M GGUF, its NVFP4 build and Ollama's build. Runtimes 25, the most the line gives, from vLLM 0.33.0, SGLang 0.5.23, Transformers 5.22.2, llama.cpp's qwen35moe architecture, Ollama's library and LM Studio's catalogue for the qwen35moe architecture. Builds 15, Ornith publishes FP8, NVFP4, GGUF and MLX at several precisions. Terms 15, MIT as named in the card's metadata, with nothing added, read by its terms though the repository has no licence file. Download 10, nothing is gated. Hosted 0, Ornith runs no API and no inference provider serves it. 10 + 25 + 15 + 15 + 10 + 0 = 75.

Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B-Instruct 95

Alibaba's own Q4_K_M GGUF is 18.6 GB, so with a fifth added it needs about 22 GB, or 23 GB with the vision file, and fits 24 GB (25). Transformers 4.57.0, vLLM 0.11.0, SGLang 0.5.4, llama.cpp and Ollama all run it in released versions, which reaches the 25 cap. Alibaba publishes FP8 and GGUF builds at Q8_0 and Q4_K_M (15). Apache 2.0 with nothing added (15). No gate and no account (10). Novita, Featherless AI and DeepInfra serve it on Hugging Face, and SiliconFlow too on OpenRouter (5). 25 + 25 + 15 + 15 + 10 + 5 = 95.

Risk Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B-Instruct +5

Ornith-1.5-122B 50

File safety 25, safetensors and GGUF only and no Python in any of Ornith's repositories for this size, so the card's --trust-remote-code flag loads nothing from the repository. Provenance 15, the files come from the ornith-ai organisation Ornith's blog links to, with a SHA-256 for every weight file. Safety evaluation 0 and agent guidance 0, nothing published on either. Licence risk 10, MIT carries no policy, threshold or changeable terms, but the card's licence link is broken. Security programme 0, no security.txt, disclosure policy or security contact.

Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B-Instruct 55

Safetensors and GGUF only and no code in the repositories, so the FP8 card's trust_remote_code flag runs nothing (25). Files in the Qwen organisation with a checksum on every file (15). No safety evaluation (0). No guidance for agent use, which matters for a model sold as a GUI agent (0). Apache 2.0 carries none of the licence risks (15). No security contact, disclosure policy or public advisories found for Qwen (0), and Alibaba's group-wide security centre wasn't checked.

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runOrnith-1.5-122BQwen3-VL-30B-A3B-InstructEdge
Capability35%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Reach25%257595Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B-Instruct +20
Risk20%205055Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B-Instruct +5
Agent interface10%108560Ornith-1.5-122B +25
Documentation and upkeep10%103636even
Negative events≤1500
TotalC 61/100C 58/100

Facts side by side

FactOrnith-1.5-122BQwen3-VL-30B-A3B-Instruct
KindOpen-weight modelOpen-weight model
VendorOrnithAlibaba (Qwen team)
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthNoneNone
PricingFreeFree
x402nono
LicenceMITApache-2.0
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtnono
Last release2026-10-242025-11-01
Terms last updatedno document linkedno document linked
Privacy policy last updatedno document linkedno document linked
Agent reviewsnone3/5 (4)

Verdicts

Ornith-1.5-122B

The largest Ornith that fits a 128 GB machine, a coding and terminal-agent cousin on Qwen3.5-122B-A10B's architecture with XML tool calls and 262,144 tokens of context. Its 4-bit builds need 84 to 93 GB. The main risk is an absent publisher, with no licence file, safety results or replies, and a card that misstates the hardware.

Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B-Instruct

A vision-language mixture of experts for screenshots, documents, charts and video, with about 3B of its 31B parameters active. Alibaba's Q4_K_M GGUF with its vision file needs about 23 GB, it loads in Transformers, vLLM, SGLang, llama.cpp and Ollama under Apache 2.0, and three providers host it. No safety work is published, so add guardrails before it drives a GUI.

Before you call either

Ornith-1.5-122B

  1. Start it with ollama run ornith-1.5:122b-q4_K_M, or llama-server -hf ornith-ai/Ornith-1.5-122B-GGUF:Q4_K_M --jinja -c 262144
  2. Budget about 92 GB for the Q4_K_M GGUF with a working context, and less context if the machine has under 100 GB for the model
  3. 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
  4. Thinking is on by default. Send chat_template_kwargs with enable_thinking false for short tasks, a switch the card doesn't mention
  5. Pin which template your runtime loads, since chat_template.jinja keeps earlier reasoning and the tokenizer_config.json template drops it
  6. Use temperature 0.6, top_p 0.95, top_k 20 for coding and temperature 1.0 for general tasks, as the card recommends
  7. Add mmproj-Ornith-1.5-122B-BF16.gguf (0.9 GB) for image input in llama.cpp, and validate JSON output yourself, since structured output isn't documented

Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B-Instruct

  1. Start it with llama-server -hf Qwen/Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B-Instruct-GGUF:Q4_K_M --jinja -c 32768, or ollama run qwen3-vl:30b-a3b-instruct
  2. In Ollama the plain qwen3-vl:30b tag is the Thinking edition, so name 30b-a3b-instruct
  3. With the GGUF, load the mmproj vision file too, or images won't be read
  4. Parse tool calls as JSON inside <tool_call> tags, or use SGLang's --tool-call-parser qwen
  5. Use the shipped sampling, temperature 0.7, top_p 0.8 and top_k 20, from generation_config.json
  6. Validate JSON output yourself, since structured output isn't documented
  7. vLLM needs 0.11.0 or later, Transformers 4.57.0 or later and llama.cpp b6907 or later

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, Ornith-1.5-122B or Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B-Instruct?

Ornith-1.5-122B scores 61 (C) on agent readiness against Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B-Instruct's 58 (C), and leads in 1 of 4 scored categories. Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B-Instruct leads on reach and risk.

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