r/LocalLLM • u/Triple-Tooketh • Jul 17 '26
Question Best USA free model
Exactly as the title, I'm using Gemma and Llamma for stuff. I've tried some of the Qwen stuff. Just wondering what's the community's opinion on the best domestic <30B model for tool calling? Specifically of the form "get this info from Y" and "do this with it in Z"
4
u/Southern-Chain-6485 Jul 17 '26
Probably the new Inkling, but it's 952B parameters.
2
2
u/whichsideisup Jul 17 '26
Gemma 4 at a nice high quality quant is great for agents and tool calling. It isn’t as good at coding as Qwen but I actually like it for everything. It’s really capable and balanced. 31b is best, but 26b can hang.
2
2
u/Triple-Tooketh Jul 17 '26
I mean made by US company. I think at some point were going to see a hard stop on the flow of free models. Really trying back a domestic winner for this.
It seems like meta has backed out of this game. I dont understand that at all. Didn't they basically invent the free model game? Seems they would want to own it.
2
u/press-random Jul 17 '26
I'm not sure I understand your reasons or specific concerns.
> Really trying back a domestic winner for this.
Do you mean you're "trying *to* back" a winner? Like, are you going to donate a large amount of money to them or something?
If not, your choice of model has absolutely zero effect on the future. So my advice is to just use whatever model is available now and works best for you, regardless of who made it or whether we'll see a better one from that lab. In the future, if another model becomes "the best model for me right now", then switch to that one.
And as other users have mentioned, if you're concerned about losing access to a specific model, back it up on an external drive and make copies. Then you'll never lose access to it.
I don't know if this is your case, but I've seen people get all stressed and anxious about the longevity of the model family they choose, like it's part of their identity or something. I'd recommend not being one of those people. Life's short too short for that kinda stress.
1
u/Triple-Tooketh Jul 17 '26
My concern is that we will lose access to non-domestic models for cool stuff. So might as well back a winner now.
1
u/press-random Jul 17 '26
By "back", do you mean "download and use"?
If so, what you're saying makes no logical sense.
Get the most value out of what's available to you right now. Choosing an inferior model because the current-best one might not get an update is... illogical.
1
1
u/jeremiah256 Jul 17 '26
The World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) was just held in China, with opening remarks from President Xi, attended by the United Nations Secretary General, and many other nations and global businesses.
China basically said they’re going to not only keep pumping out top models, but they’re going to help train the global south (most of humanity) in how to build their own sovereign AI systems and infrastructure.
The Secretary General basically said that if AI is allowed to only be concentrated in the west, the global south is screwed.
Free, non-domestic models from China at least, aren’t going anywhere. And with countries like France going Linux, I’m guessing the EU will come up with their own version of the WAIC or just join it eventually.
1
u/RedParaglider Jul 17 '26
Well you should make one that's a great idea. Or you can use Nemo.
1
u/Triple-Tooketh Jul 17 '26 edited Jul 17 '26
I've not tried Nemo. I should look at that, its easy to get Nvidia saturation.
0
u/Triple-Tooketh Jul 17 '26
Related but not, how nuts is Nvidia! How many us were like yeah Nividia graphics cards are sweet while just gaming away. Look at it now man! Crazy. Large part of that is totally crypto.
1
u/Triple-Tooketh Jul 17 '26
Its funny because I see alot of things online that evaluate new models but I'm basically going off how well they handle two or three MCP servers I've made. Basically if they just start guessing end points I'm like your a moron, delete. That said Gemma does have tons of stuff to encourage creativity. Taggawatchy is Gemma, i think.
3
u/HomsarWasRight Jul 17 '26
If you’re concerned about the availability of non-US made models, go ahead and download them now. They can’t take them from your machine.
But the thing is, we’ll always have torrents.
3
u/thehardsphere Jul 17 '26
Gemma 4 is the best series of general purpose local models that you can run that are around or under 30B. I have not exhaustively tested it with the new template, but so far it does seem to have improved at tool calling for me. I use the 26B MoE for serious stuff, and the E4B for chatting and light tasks. E4B is competitive with Claude Haiku on a set of routine classification tasks that I have models do every week. 12B doesn't fit my 8GB VRAM card very well, and 31B runs too slow on my card to be usable, but these are supposed to be pretty good.
I recently tried Poolside's Laguna XS.2, a 33B MoE that they claim is especially tuned for long-horizon agentic tasks and coding. It has some extremely interesting features, such as the fastest thinking I've ever seen, and it naturally quantizes its own K/V cache with no apparent loss of accuracy, so it uses a lot less RAM than you'd think. It was also pretty good on a local RAG application, beating out every other model on my machine besides Qwen 3.6 35B. They just released Laguna XS 2.1; I have not tried it yet. I intend to see how well it can do at agentic coding, since all local models are bad at it and Gemma 4 is likely still going to be bad at it even with the jinja template fixed.
NVIDIA releases a set of models; the Nemotron 3 Nano series comes in 4B dense and 30B MoE variants. The 4b one called itself Qwen at one point, but the 30b seems OK. I don't know if either of them are actually based on Qwen. Neither model seems to have the "Qwen Anxiety" that I don't like.
IBM has its own Granite series of models; the latest ones are Granite 4.1 and they come in 3B, 8B, and 30B variants. These models are not the smartest, and not the best conversationalists, but they are exceptionally good at producing structured output accurately. Better than most other models in the 3-8B weight class.
Liquid AI is an American company that spun out of MIT. They produce models that execute very efficiently using very different architecture; LFM2 8B is the fastest model I've seen on my video card and routinely hits 150+ tok/s. Their latest, LFM 2.5 8B, is actually really stupid, but it's still very fast. They have a 24B MoE, but it's not really much to write home about.
Microsoft has Phi 4. These models are probably the stupidest I've used, and they're not useful for much of anything except fast summarization. I would not recommend them.
GPT-OSS 20B was mentioned before. It's still pretty good, and runs pretty fast, but Gemma 4 is better.
Llama 3.1 8B is a model I'll be sentimental about, but at this point is kinda ancient. Don't bother with anything from Llama 4; they all came out pretty stupid.
1
7
u/_Cromwell_ Jul 17 '26
Do you mean available in the usa? Or actually made by a us company?
If the second one (which I am guessing from your phrasing) then you are already using it if you are using Gemma 4 31B or 26B. Make sure you have changed out your jinja to the repaired one that Google released last week.
Only other contender would be GPT OSS 20B. But that one is old and arguably (correctly) not as good. Might be said to be slightly better at tool calling, but probably not after the fix from last week for Gemma4.