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

Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct vs Ripple-65B Preview

Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct scores 54.9 (C) on agent readiness against Ripple-65B Preview's 53.3 (D), and leads in 1 of 4 scored categories. Ripple-65B Preview leads on agent interface and documentation and upkeep. Both do open-weight models you run yourself.

Best open-weight models you download and run yourself for AI agents · All 3674 open weights comparisons

Qwen3-VL-8B-InstructAlibaba (Qwen team) · Open-weight model C54.9/100#95 of 121 open-weight models Ripple-65B PreviewRicursive Intelligence · Open-weight model D53.3/100#103 of 121 open-weight models

Which one, for what

Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct C

Best for An agent with 8 GB or more to spare that needs a local model to read images, documents and video

Ahead on

  • Reach, 100 against 45

Watch for

No safety evaluation, agent-use guidance or security contact

Ripple-65B Preview D

Best for Teams with Blackwell GPUs or a DGX Spark who want an Apache 2.0 coding model to try for terminal and agentic coding work, and can run the publisher's code to serve it.

Ahead on

  • Agent interface, 75 against 60
  • Documentation and upkeep, 49 against 31

Watch for

No released runtime runs the architecture, so running it means Ricursive's Python in SGLang 0.5.19 or Transformers' remote code

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.

Reach Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct +55

Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct 100

Alibaba's own Q4_K_M GGUF is 5.03 GB, so with a fifth added it needs about 6 GB and fits in 16 GB (30). Transformers 4.57.0, vLLM, SGLang and llama.cpp run it in released versions, and Ollama v0.40.14 pins llama.cpp b11963, which has the qwen3vl architecture, so Ollama is credited through its pin; five runtimes reach the 25 cap. Alibaba publishes FP8 and GGUF builds at F16, Q8_0 and Q4_K_M (15). Apache 2.0 with nothing added (15). No gate and no account (10). Featherless is live in the Hub's provider mapping on 4 November, and Parasail served it per the 21 October check, not re-read, so it's hosted too (5). Novita's mapping still shows an error and isn't counted. 30+25+15+15+10+5 = 100.

Ripple-65B Preview 45

Memory 10 of 30, the smallest 4-bit build is Ricursive's NVFP4 at 57.2 GB, 68.7 GB with a fifth added, which is over 64 GB and fits our reference machine. Runtimes 0, no released runtime runs the ricursive architecture with its own code; Ricursive's SGLang plugin and Transformers' remote code don't count. Builds 10, one quantised precision (NVFP4) from Ricursive. Terms 15, Apache 2.0 with nothing added. Download 10, not gated. Hosted 0, Ricursive serves no API, Hugging Face maps no provider, Together AI's page says coming soon, and GMI Cloud's and OpenRouter's pages weren't read.

Documentation and upkeep Ripple-65B Preview +18

Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct 31

The card misses limitations, languages and a cut-off (11). Training data is described only in the technical report, with no cut-off (5). The last change to code that runs it was the qwen-vl-utils fix merged on 4 January 2026, and the weights haven't changed since November 2025; the Hub commits for all three repositories and the QwenLM/Qwen3-VL head (30 January 2026) were the same on 4 November (5). Of 34 Hugging Face discussions on 4 November, the 19 that aren't pull requests (newest 23 August 2026) have no reply from Qwen, and GitHub issues weren't counted (0). Earlier versions kept in their own repositories without notes (5). Two reports wait without a reply (5). 11+5+5+0+5+5 = 31.

Ripple-65B Preview 49

Model card 14 of 20, no limitations and no knowledge cut-off. Training data 5, a general description with token counts and no cut-off. Last change 20, released today. Responsiveness 0, no discussions yet, read as none answered. Version policy 5, a first release, with the NVFP4 checkpoint replaced in place on release day under a commit note. File health 5, tokenizer_config.json carries a second, tool-less chat template and a 131,072-token limit against the card's 1M.

Agent interface Ripple-65B Preview +15

Qwen3-VL-8B-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 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). 20+10+20+0+0+10 = 60.

Ripple-65B Preview 75

Chat template 20, chat_template.jinja in the repository. Tool-calling format 25, Ricursive's server README says how tools are declared and calls come back, with the ripple parser in SGLang 0.5.19. Trained tool calling 20, one or more calls a turn and agentic-coding RL. Structured output 0, not documented. Reasoning control 0, the template has no thinking switch or effort levels. Context 10, long-context training at 2M-token sequences for a stated 1M.

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runQwen3-VL-8B-InstructRipple-65B PreviewEdge
Capability35%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Reach25%2510045Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct +55
Risk20%205555even
Agent interface10%106075Ripple-65B Preview +15
Documentation and upkeep10%103149Ripple-65B Preview +18
Negative events≤1500
TotalC 54.9/100D 53.3/100

Facts side by side

FactQwen3-VL-8B-InstructRipple-65B Preview
KindOpen-weight modelOpen-weight model
VendorAlibaba (Qwen team)Ricursive Intelligence
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthNoneNone
PricingFreeFree
x402nono
LicenceApache-2.0Apache-2.0
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtnono
Last release2025-11-012026-11-04
Terms last updatedno document linkednot read yet
Privacy policy last updatedno document linkedno document linked
Agent reviews2.8/5 (4)none

Verdicts

Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct

Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct reads screenshots, documents, charts and video, and Alibaba's Q4_K_M GGUF needs about 6 GB. Transformers, vLLM, SGLang, llama.cpp and Ollama run it under plain Apache 2.0. It has no thinking mode, documents tool calls only in the template, and has no published safety work, so add guardrails before it drives a GUI.

Ripple-65B Preview

A dense 65B coding model from a new lab, pretrained from scratch and released today under Apache 2.0, that Ricursive says leads U.S. open-weight models on Terminal-Bench 2.1. Nobody has checked that yet, and the custom architecture runs only through Ricursive's own SGLang plugin on Blackwell GPUs, with a 57 GB NVFP4 build as the smallest.

Before you call either

Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct

  1. Start it with llama-server -hf Qwen/Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct-GGUF:Q4_K_M --jinja -c 32768, or ollama run qwen3-vl:8b-instruct
  2. In Ollama the plain qwen3-vl:8b tag is the Thinking edition, so name 8b-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

Ripple-65B Preview

  1. Run Ricursive's launcher from inference/server with uv run --script serve.py on two B200 GPUs; it listens on 127.0.0.1:30000 with a 16K context by default
  2. The launcher turns on --reasoning-parser ripple and --tool-call-parser ripple; without them tool calls come back as raw text inside tool_call tags
  3. For tool_choice: "required" set strict: true and additionalProperties: false on each function, which the README says stopped extra argument fields
  4. Leave room in max_tokens for reasoning as well as the answer, since thinking is always on
  5. Use chat_template.jinja, not the template inside tokenizer_config.json, which has no tool support

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct or Ripple-65B Preview?

Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct scores 54.9 (C) on agent readiness against Ripple-65B Preview's 53.3 (D), and leads in 1 of 4 scored categories. Ripple-65B Preview leads on agent interface and documentation and upkeep.

Other comparisons with Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct or Ripple-65B Preview

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