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

Ornith-1.5-397B vs Qwen3.8-Flash-Next

Qwen3.8-Flash-Next scores 61.8 (C) on agent readiness against Ornith-1.5-397B's 59 (C), and leads in 0 of 4 scored categories. Ornith-1.5-397B leads on risk and agent interface. 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

  • Risk, 50 against 45
  • Agent interface, 85 against 70

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

Qwen3.8-Flash-Next C

Best for Teams with a multi-GPU server or a 128 GB Mac who want Qwen's newest sparse architecture for agentic coding and multimodal work, and aren't a hosted-model or coding-assistant business.

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

Watch for

No build fits the reference machine's 107.4 GB, and Ollama's smallest Linux build is 120 GB

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runOrnith-1.5-397BQwen3.8-Flash-NextEdge
Capability35%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Reach25%256565even
Risk20%205045Ornith-1.5-397B +5
Agent interface10%108570Ornith-1.5-397B +15
Documentation and upkeep10%103636even
Negative events≤1500
TotalC 59/100C 61.8/100

Facts side by side

FactOrnith-1.5-397BQwen3.8-Flash-Next
KindOpen-weight modelOpen-weight model
VendorOrnithAlibaba (Qwen team)
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthNoneNone
PricingFreeFree
x402nono
LicenceMITQwen Community License 1.0 (custom, not an OSI licence). Free of charge, the model name shown in products above 100M monthly users or US$20M monthly revenue, and a separate licence from Qwen before commercial use by a Model as a Service or AI Work Assistant business
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtnono
Last release2026-08-232026-08-31
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)2/5 (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.

Qwen3.8-Flash-Next

A large sparse cousin with 6B active parameters for agentic coding and multimodal work, previewing Qwen's next architecture. It needs a 128 GB Mac for Ollama's MLX build or about 144 GB for the 4-bit GGUF, and Qwen Cloud serves it. The main risk is a licence that needs a separate deal for hosted-model and coding or office assistant businesses.

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

Qwen3.8-Flash-Next

  1. On a 128 GB Mac start it with ollama run qwen3.8-flash-next:125b-mlx (105 GB, NVFP4), on Linux the smallest Ollama build is qwen3.8-flash-next:125b-a6b-q4_K_M at 120 GB, which won't fit a 107.4 GB GPU share
  2. On a server, vllm serve Qwen/Qwen3.8-Flash-Next-FP8 --tensor-parallel-size 4 --max-model-len 262144 --reasoning-parser qwen3 --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser qwen3_coder
  3. Use the qwen3_coder tool parser and the qwen3 reasoning parser, as Qwen's GitHub README does
  4. Thinking is on by default, pass chat_template_kwargs with enable_thinking false to skip it, and read the reasoning from reasoning_content, even though SGLang's cookbook says thinking can't be turned off
  5. reasoning_effort takes xhigh (default), medium or low, and any other value makes the template raise an error
  6. Send at most one system message and put it first, since the template raises an error otherwise
  7. Sampling per the card is temperature 1.0 and top_p 0.95 when thinking, temperature 0.7, top_p 0.8 and presence_penalty 1.5 without
  8. vLLM keeps the 51B n-gram table in host memory on 80 GB GPUs by default, per its recipe
  9. Validate JSON output yourself or use the runtime's guided decoding, since structured output isn't documented
  10. Read the Qwen Community License before serving it to others as an API or inside a coding or office assistant product

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, Ornith-1.5-397B or Qwen3.8-Flash-Next?

Qwen3.8-Flash-Next scores 61.8 (C) on agent readiness against Ornith-1.5-397B's 59 (C), and leads in 0 of 4 scored categories. Ornith-1.5-397B leads on risk and agent interface.

Other comparisons with Ornith-1.5-397B or Qwen3.8-Flash-Next

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