Comparisons of Small Open Source AI Models (4B-40B)

Name: Openness
Creator: Artificial Analysis
License: https://artificialanalysis.ai/docs/legal/Terms-of-Use.pdf

Open source AI models with between 4B to 40B parameters.

Models are considered open source (also commonly referred to as open weights) where their weights are accessible to download. This allows self-hosting on your own infrastructure and enables customizing the model such as through fine-tuning.

For more details including relating to our methodology, see our FAQs.

Qwen3.6 27B and

Qwen3.5 27B are the highest intelligence Small open source models, defined as those with 4B-40B parameters, followed by

Qwen3.6 35B A3B &

Qwen3.6 27B.

Highlights

Openness

Artificial Analysis Openness Index · Higher is better

Updated

Intelligence

Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index · Higher is better

Total Parameters

Trainable parameters in billions

Openness

Artificial Analysis Openness Index: Score

Openness Index assesses model openness on a 0 to 100 normalized scale (higher is more open)

Reasoning models are indicated by a lightbulb icon

Intelligence

Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index

Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index v4.1 incorporates 9 evaluations: GDPval-AA v2, 𝜏³-Banking, Terminal-Bench v2.1, SciCode, Humanity's Last Exam, GPQA Diamond, CritPt, AA-Omniscience, AA-LCR

Estimate (independent evaluation forthcoming)

Reasoning models are indicated by a lightbulb icon

Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index v4.1 includes: GDPval-AA v2, 𝜏³-Banking, Terminal-Bench v2.1, SciCode, Humanity's Last Exam, GPQA Diamond, CritPt, AA-Omniscience, AA-LCR. See Intelligence Index methodology for further details, including a breakdown of each evaluation and how we run them.

Intelligence Evaluations

Intelligence evaluations measured independently by Artificial Analysis · Higher is better

GDPval-AA v2

Agentic real-world work tasks, (Elo-500)/2000

𝜏³-Banking

Agentic tool use

Terminal-Bench v2.1

Agentic coding & terminal use

SciCode

Coding

Humanity's Last Exam

Reasoning & knowledge

GPQA Diamond

Scientific reasoning

CritPt

Physics reasoning

AA-Omniscience Accuracy

Knowledge

AA-Omniscience Non-Hallucination Rate

1 - hallucination rate

AA-LCR

Long context reasoning

AA-BriefcaseNew

Agentic knowledge work, Elo

AutomationBench-AANew

Agentic SaaS workflows

No data available

Harvey LAB-AANew

Legal agentic work, task all-pass rate

EnterpriseOps-Gym-AANew

Agentic business operations

IFBench

Instruction following

APEX-Agents-AA

Long-horizon agentic tasks

No data available

ITBench-AA

Kubernetes incident root-cause analysis

MMMU-Pro

Visual reasoning

Reasoning models are indicated by a lightbulb icon.

While model intelligence generally translates across use cases, specific evaluations may be more relevant for certain use cases.

Size

Model Size: Total and Active Parameters

Comparison between total model parameters and parameters active during inference

Reasoning models are indicated by a lightbulb icon

The total number of trainable weights and biases in the model, expressed in billions. These parameters are learned during training and determine the model's ability to process and generate responses.

The number of parameters actually executed during each inference forward pass, expressed in billions. For Mixture of Experts (MoE) models, a routing mechanism selects a subset of experts per token, resulting in fewer active than total parameters. Dense models use all parameters, so active equals total.

Intelligence vs. Active Parameters

Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index · Active parameters at inference time

Most attractive quadrant

Reasoning models are indicated by a lightbulb icon.

Intelligence vs. Total Parameters

Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index · Size in parameters (billions)

Most attractive quadrant

Reasoning models are indicated by a lightbulb icon.

The total number of trainable weights and biases in the model, expressed in billions. These parameters are learned during training and determine the model's ability to process and generate responses.

Context Window

Context window: tokens limit · Higher is better

Reasoning models are indicated by a lightbulb icon

Larger context windows are relevant to RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) LLM workflows which typically involve reasoning and information retrieval of large amounts of data.

Maximum number of combined input & output tokens. Output tokens commonly have a significantly lower limit (varied by model).

Further details

							Weights		Provider Benchmarks
Qwen3.6 27B (Reasoning)	Alibaba	37	27.8B	262k	$0.9	55	🤗	+3	View
Qwen3.6 35B A3B (Reasoning)	Alibaba	32	36B 3B active at inference time	262k	$0.4	148	🤗	+6	View
Qwen3.6 27B (Non-reasoning)	Alibaba	30	27.8B	262k	$0.9	57	🤗	+2	View
Gemma 4 31B (Reasoning)	Google	29	30.7B	256k	-	36	🤗	+9	View
Gemma 4 26B A4B (Reasoning)	Google	26	25.2B 3.8B active at inference time	256k	$0.1	-	🤗	+5	View
Qwen3.6 35B A3B (Non-reasoning)	Alibaba	24	36B 3B active at inference time	262k	$0.6	178	🤗	+5	View
Qwen3.5 35B A3B (Non-reasoning)	Alibaba	24	36B 3B active at inference time	262k	$0.4	162	🤗		View
EXAONE 4.5 33B	LG AI Research	23	34.4B	262k	-	-	🤗	-	View
Gemma 4 12B (Reasoning)	Google	22	12B	256k	$0.1	108	🤗		View
Gemma 4 31B (Non-reasoning)	Google	22	30.7B	256k	$0.2	45	🤗	+5	View
Qwen3.5 9B (Reasoning)	Alibaba	21	9.7B	262k	$0.1	58	🤗		View
Nemotron Cascade 2 30B A3B	NVIDIA	21	31.6B 3B active at inference time	1M	-	-	🤗	-	View

Comparisons of Small Open Source AI Models (4B-40B)

Openness

Intelligence

Total Parameters

Openness

Artificial Analysis Openness Index: Score

Intelligence

Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index

Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index

Intelligence Evaluations

Intelligence Evaluation Relevance

Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index

Size

Model Size: Total and Active Parameters

Total Parameters

Active Parameters at Inference Time

Intelligence vs. Active Parameters

Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index

Active Parameters at Inference Time

Intelligence vs. Total Parameters

Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index

Total Parameters

Context Window

Context Window

Context Window for RAG

Context Window

Further details