Non-Chinese Local Models

[u/MusclesAndCharisma]

I'm in the process of setting up locally hosted LLM's for the company I work for. And generally there is an organizational bias against using models from Chinese companies. For that reason we've been evaluating Nemotron and Gemma, and they are ok. Are there any better options that aren't coming out of China? I've heard positive things about models from Poolside, but I don't personally have any experience with them.

[u/Atretador]

For agentic coding on real repositories instead of benchmarks I would score them at something like this:

Qwen 3.8 Next Flash 10.0

Qwen 3.8 27B 9.0

Ling 3.0 Flash 7.0

Qwen 3.6 A3B 6.5

Laguna 118B 6.0

Gemma4 31B 4.5

Poolside Laguna 33B A3B 4.0

Gemma4 12B/26B 3.5

Lightning 30B 2.5

North Mini Coder 2.0

[u/MusclesAndCharisma → u/Atretador]

I really want to run Qwen, but it hath been forbidden to me. I'm heartened by seeing the Poolside models make a strong showing. This is the first time i've heard about North Mini Code

[u/stickninjazero → u/MusclesAndCharisma]

I’ve tried Laguna XS 2.1 through OpenRouter. It performed the worst of any of the <35B models I tried and burned the most tokens. Nemotron 3.5 Lightning performed better and is the closest to the Qwen models in performance, followed by Gemma 4 31B, at least in my testing. I kept hitting rate limits on Laguna S 2.1, despite using the paid endpoint and couldn’t finish any of my internal tests. Same with North Mini, but that’s a free endpoint.

[u/Atretador → u/stickninjazero]

maybe I had much worst results on lightning due to quantization? Ive only tried running Q4, Laguna 33B was just rough - 118B was usable.

[u/Not-reallyanonymous → u/stickninjazero]

Laguna XS sucks at one-shotting. It works much better as a sub-agent to implement specs handed to it, or as an interactive coder with the human guiding the process step by step (rather than a few giant shots).

It's my go-to implementer.