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

Ornith-1.5-397B vs Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507

Ornith-1.5-397B scores 59 (C) on agent readiness against Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507's 56.6 (C), and leads in 2 of 4 scored categories. Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507 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 2870 open weights comparisons

Which one, for what

Ornith-1.5-397B C

Best for A self-hosted frontier-scale coding agent on an 8-GPU server, where a clear licence file and an answering publisher aren't required

Ahead on

  • Agent interface, 85 against 75
  • Documentation and upkeep, 36 against 26

Watch for

Needs about 290 GB of memory at 4 bits and about 970 GB in BF16, so it doesn't fit the reference machine

Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507 C

Best for Agents that want a fast, capable instruct model on one 24 GB GPU or a 32 GB Mac, with a plain licence and long context.

Ahead on

  • Reach, 90 against 65
  • Risk, 55 against 50

Also in its favour

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

Watch for

No safety results, prompt-injection guidance or security contact

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runOrnith-1.5-397BQwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507Edge
Capability35%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Reach25%256590Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507 +25
Risk20%205055Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507 +5
Agent interface10%108575Ornith-1.5-397B +10
Documentation and upkeep10%103626Ornith-1.5-397B +10
Negative events≤1500
TotalC 59/100C 56.6/100

Facts side by side

FactOrnith-1.5-397BQwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507
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 release2026-08-232025-09-17
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 reviews2/5 (4)2.8/5 (4)

Verdicts

Ornith-1.5-397B

Ornith's flagship coding and terminal-agent cousin, with XML tool calls that vLLM and SGLang parse and 262,144 tokens of context. It needs about 290 GB even at 4 bits, so a multi-GPU server, not the 128 GB reference machine. The main risk is an absent publisher, with no licence file, no safety results and files replaced without a note.

Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507

A quick general-purpose cousin, with 3.3B of 30.5B parameters active per token, for instruction following, tool calling and long documents without a thinking step. It needs about 21 to 23 GB at 4 bits, and several providers host it. The main risk is neglect, with no file changes in over a year, no answers from Alibaba and no safety results.

Before you call either

Ornith-1.5-397B

  1. Start it with the card's vLLM command at --tensor-parallel-size 8, or ollama run ornith-1.5:397b on a machine with about 300 GB of memory
  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. When downloading the NVFP4 build, fetch only the files its model.safetensors.index.json names (the 25-shard set, 241.7 GB), not the eight extra shards
  6. Pin a revision when you download, since Ornith has replaced files in place
  7. Validate JSON output yourself, since structured output isn't documented

Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507

  1. Quickest start is ollama run qwen3:30b-instruct, 19 GB. Plain qwen3:30b and qwen3:30b-a3b are the Thinking-2507 edition, not this one
  2. On our reference machine use BF16 with vllm serve Qwen/Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507 --max-model-len 262144 --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser hermes, 61 GB of weights fits the GPU share
  3. Use the hermes parser in vLLM or qwen25 in SGLang, the template emits JSON inside tool_call tags
  4. Don't pass enable_thinking, this edition never thinks and the card says the flag isn't needed
  5. Sampling per the card is temperature 0.7, top_p 0.8, top_k 20 and min_p 0, with presence_penalty up to 2 against repetition
  6. Leave config.json as it is unless you need more than 262,144 tokens, the 1M mode swaps in config_1m.json and runs one sequence at a time
  7. Validate JSON yourself or use the runtime's guided decoding, since structured output isn't documented

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, Ornith-1.5-397B or Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507?

Ornith-1.5-397B scores 59 (C) on agent readiness against Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507's 56.6 (C), and leads in 2 of 4 scored categories. Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507 leads on reach and risk.

Other comparisons with Ornith-1.5-397B or Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507

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.