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

Ornith-1.5-35B-A3B vs Qwen3-VL-32B-Instruct

Ornith-1.5-35B-A3B scores 61 (C) on agent readiness against Qwen3-VL-32B-Instruct's 56.4 (C), and leads in 2 of 4 scored categories. Qwen3-VL-32B-Instruct leads on risk. 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

Which one, for what

Ornith-1.5-35B-A3B C

Best for Local coding and terminal agents on a 24 to 32 GB GPU or a Mac, where a clear licence file and an answering publisher aren't required

Ahead on

  • Reach, 90 against 85
  • 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-32B-Instruct C

Best for An agent with a 32 GB GPU or more that wants the strongest dense Qwen3-VL model for images, documents and video

Ahead on

  • Risk, 55 against 50

Watch for

No safety evaluation, agent-use guidance or security contact

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runOrnith-1.5-35B-A3BQwen3-VL-32B-InstructEdge
Capability35%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Reach25%259085Ornith-1.5-35B-A3B +5
Risk20%205055Qwen3-VL-32B-Instruct +5
Agent interface10%108560Ornith-1.5-35B-A3B +25
Documentation and upkeep10%103131even
Negative events≤1500
TotalC 61/100C 56.4/100

Facts side by side

FactOrnith-1.5-35B-A3BQwen3-VL-32B-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 release2026-08-232025-11-01
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 reviews2.3/5 (4)2.5/5 (4)

Verdicts

Ornith-1.5-35B-A3B

A mid-size coding and terminal-agent cousin with about 3B active parameters, XML tool calls that vLLM and SGLang parse and 262,144 tokens of context. It runs in about 24 GB from Ornith's MLX 4-bit build or 32 GB from its GGUF. The main risk is an absent publisher, with no licence file, safety results or replies to 35 reports.

Qwen3-VL-32B-Instruct

The largest dense Qwen3-VL cousin, for harder work on screenshots, documents, charts and video, needing about 25 GB from Alibaba's Q4_K_M GGUF with its vision file, in every major runtime under plain Apache 2.0. It has no thinking mode or published safety work, and only one provider was found serving it, so plan to run it yourself.

Before you call either

Ornith-1.5-35B-A3B

  1. Start it with ollama run ornith-1.5:35b, or llama-server -hf ornith-ai/Ornith-1.5-35B-A3B-GGUF --port 8000 -c 262144 as the card gives it
  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. Use temperature 0.6, top_p 0.95, top_k 20 for general tasks and temperature 1.0 to reproduce the card's benchmarks
  6. Pin a revision when you download, since Ornith has replaced files in place, and add mmproj-Ornith-1.5-35B-BF16.gguf (0.9 GB) for image input in llama.cpp
  7. Validate JSON output yourself, since structured output isn't documented

Qwen3-VL-32B-Instruct

  1. Start it with llama-server -hf Qwen/Qwen3-VL-32B-Instruct-GGUF:Q4_K_M --jinja -c 32768, or ollama run qwen3-vl:32b-instruct
  2. In Ollama the plain qwen3-vl:32b tag is the Thinking edition, so name 32b-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 card's sampling, temperature=0.7, top_p=0.8, top_k=20, presence_penalty=1.5 for vision and temperature=1.0, top_p=1.0, top_k=40, presence_penalty=2.0 for text
  6. Validate JSON output yourself, since structured output isn't documented
  7. vLLM needs 0.11.0 or later and Transformers 4.57.0 or later
  8. If you pulled the FP8 build before 22 October 2025, pull it again, since the earlier files were the Thinking edition's

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, Ornith-1.5-35B-A3B or Qwen3-VL-32B-Instruct?

Ornith-1.5-35B-A3B scores 61 (C) on agent readiness against Qwen3-VL-32B-Instruct's 56.4 (C), and leads in 2 of 4 scored categories. Qwen3-VL-32B-Instruct leads on risk.

Other comparisons with Ornith-1.5-35B-A3B or Qwen3-VL-32B-Instruct

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