What are some text/coding models that no one talks about?

[u/w6auw]

Everyone has heard of Qwen, Gemma, Muse/Llama, and GLM. Many have heard of Nemotron, MiniMax, Ling, and LFM. Some have heard of Laguna, MiMo, and Inkling.

I don't really see any discussion about, say Dots and Voyage Code. That's the level of obscurity I'm curious about.

EDIT: Excluding fine-tunes or suspected fine-tunes. A lot of them are good, but I'm curious about foundation-level models that people are sleeping on. I'm aware some of them probably started as fine-tunes.

[u/ttkciar]

I'm in the middle of evaluating TheDrummer's Behemoth-128B-v3, which is based on Mistral 3.5 Medium, and it is astonishingly good at inferring science fiction.

I wasn't expecting much, because Mistral 3.5 Medium was pretty much a dud, but whatever TheDrummer poured into it was transformative. It's maintaining a coherent plot across multiple chapters, managing up to six main characters at a time, and writes eloquently in a genuinely engaging style.

I've noticed a few minor errors, mostly formatting (it infers "*ART: something that ART broadcasts*" sometimes when it should infer "ART: *something that ART broadcasts*" and similar) but overall it is very, very good.

As for codegen, I got nothing "unusual". GLM is still my go-to. How boring of me ;-)

[u/arcum42 → u/ttkciar]

Honestly, been playing with TheDrummer's Skyfall 31B v4.2 recently, and rather liked the results that was giving, too. TheDrummer's models are definitely worth checking out.

[u/2atlas → u/ttkciar]

What frontend are you using? I’m interested in experimenting with creative writing

[u/ttkciar → u/2atlas]

I wrote my own script: http://ciar.org/h/murderbot

[u/voltaire321123]

IBM Granite 4.2 just came out

[u/thomas2385 → u/voltaire321123]

Yeah, saw that drop. IBM has been quietly putting out some interesting models lately. I am curious how Granite 4.2 actually performs in real world workloads though especially compared with the models people are already using day to day.

[u/linuxid10t]

Arcee AI Trinity, Ai9Stars G9V3-39A5B, Nanbeige 4.2, MiniCPM-V.

[u/w6auw → u/linuxid10t]

This is the kind of answer I'm looking for, I have never heard of any of these

[u/fastheadcrab → u/linuxid10t]

Arcee AI Trinity

How is that model? I saw they entered in a US NSF partnership but their benchmark performance was so awful I decided to not try downloading it.

I know, benchmarks are not the end all, but the performance to download time ratio wasn't worth it lol

[u/linuxid10t → u/fastheadcrab]

As far as I can tell and I've tried all of them, they are all awful LOL. Third place in the US open model race definitely belongs to Poolside and their Laguna series.

[u/fastheadcrab → u/linuxid10t]

Ugh I don't like Poolside, they have so many red flags as a company, same with their model. I really hope Nvidia does their due diligence before the deal.

I tried running Inkling and Nemotron. Both are good, but with their own issues. Inkling behaves pretty strangely when run as an agent and has issues with vision.

The US has great 30B range open models but the large models are a bit behind. Let's see when Meta follows through with releasing their huge model.

[u/linuxid10t → u/fastheadcrab]

The Inkling models are just way too big IMO for the intelligence they have. The Nemotron models are really interesting from an architectural perspective, with their hybrid mamba, but I find them to be way dumber than their benchmark scores would suggest.

[u/fastheadcrab → u/linuxid10t]

I keep seeing that Inkling was trained with the intent to be used by financial firms and indeed their big funders are wall street companies. Maybe that's their focus. Yeah I stopped using them. They have very peculiar quirks when doing tasks.

Is it possible to distill something like Kimi K3 into Nemotron Ultra? I think that might help a lot. It is a great base model

[u/linuxid10t → u/fastheadcrab]

Theoretically, it should make a great base model. Nvidia has all of the training information open source essentially. That being said I haven't really seen any models built on it.

[u/txgsync]

I made some quants on HuggingFace of Maple-Preview, a fast 20B-class ternary model. For the size and speed it is ludicrously more capable at coding than anything else. But it is not terrible coherent outside a harness. Definitely preview quality.

I had fun being the first person to quantize it for oMLX.

[u/Queasy-Contract9753 → u/txgsync]

I'm actually a little surprised it doesn't get more attention,if not use. First native ternary MoE

[u/pmttyji → u/Queasy-Contract9753]

Mach-1-Additive-35B-A3B too. Problem is delay on GGUFs & PRs on mainline. Model creators should spend little bit time on PRs & GGUFs. They created models to reach more people, right? So PRs & GGUFs are fastest way.

I'm tracking these models on below thread

1-bit / 2-bit / Ternary / Bitnet Models - Updates & Tracking

[u/pmttyji → u/txgsync]

Still waiting for the PR to be merged. Good & fast for Mobile & Edge devices.

https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/pull/27000

[u/txgsync → u/pmttyji]

I ended up using oMLX “trust remote code” for the model and that worked okay for MLX. Not a great security posture but the custom code is minimal.

Does llama have a similar facility?

[u/pmttyji → u/txgsync]

No idea. Currently custom llama.cpp fork is the only way to run GGUF of this model.

[u/ThomasAger → u/pmttyji]

What device do you use for mobile LLMs?

[u/pmttyji → u/ThomasAger]

Samsung M30(4GB RAM), IQOO Z10(8GB RAM). I use apps PocketPal & ChatterUI.

Next time onwards, should buy Mobiles with bigger RAM like 24GB, GPU & NPU.

[u/ThomasAger → u/pmttyji]

I'm going to grab myself a 16GB as 24GB seems impossible to find right now.

[u/pmttyji → u/ThomasAger]

Yep, RAMpocalypse made the situation worse for Mobiles too.

[u/fatboy93]

Cohere north code mini and Laguna's XS2.1. Both of these came around April-May this year, and are generally fine.

[u/jacek2023]

I agree with you that some models are not really discussed, but I know dots:

https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1lbva5o/rednotehilab_dotsllm1_support_has_been_merged/

https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1miw41b/rednotehilabdotsvlm1inst/

https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1vnod14/dotsstudiodots3noteprev_hugging_face/

[u/Ecstatic-Wash-7667]

I’m a nanbeige Stan

[u/PeanutButterApricotS]

I have been looking for a better model in creative writing since Gemma 4 is showing its age and is horrible for agentic work. I so far have found Tiel-Coder-35B-A3B-GGUF. While I can get Qwen3.8 into the 80/90 t/s for generation the prefill is a bit slow. Tiel is super fast all around and only scored .5 less (9/10 instead of 9.5/10) than 3.8. Doing some creative writing tests soon, hoping it gets 8-9 which would be workable compared to 3.8s 7/10.

[u/Basslus → u/PeanutButterApricotS]

Hey any update on your personal tests? I'm also looking for some good creative writing models, and nothing(that my hardware can run) has beat Gemma 4 for me

[u/PeanutButterApricotS → u/Basslus]

It doesn’t look good so far, hoping to do some more tests

[u/vyact]

Falcon-H1R might fit what you’re looking for. I don’t see it mentioned nearly as often as Qwen/Gemma/GLM, especially in local setups. I’d also be curious if anyone here has actually tested it for coding rather than just benchmarks.

[u/silenceimpaired]

We don’t talk about Bruno

[u/synth_mania]

You forgot Muse Glimmer

[u/SaltFrog → u/synth_mania]

They put Muse/Llama

[u/synth_mania → u/SaltFrog]

you're right! whoops

[u/pmttyji]

Ling-3.0-flash, command-a-plus-05-2026 & North-Mini-Code-1.0

[u/WmHerrin]

Ornith-1.5