Comparisons of Tiny Open Source AI Models (≤4B)

Open source AI models with 4B parameters or fewer. These are usually the smallest models in terms of resource demand.

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.

Alibaba logoQwen3 4B 2507 and OpenBMB logoMiniCPM5-1B are the highest intelligence Tiny open source models, defined as those with ≤4B parameters, followed by OpenBMB logoMiniCPM5-1B & Nanbeige logoNanbeige4.1-3B.

Highlights

Artificial Analysis Openness Index · Higher is better
Updated
Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index · Higher is better
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

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

Agentic tool use

Agentic coding & terminal use

Coding

Reasoning & knowledge

Scientific reasoning

Physics reasoning

Long context reasoning

Agentic knowledge work, Elo

No data available

Agentic SaaS workflows

No data available

Legal agentic work, criterion pass rate

No data available

Agentic business operations

No data available

Instruction following

Long-horizon agentic tasks

No data available

Kubernetes incident root-cause analysis

No data available

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.

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.

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 Index vs. Active Parameters

Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index · Active parameters at inference time
Most attractive quadrant
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.

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 Index vs. Total Parameters

Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index · Size in parameters (billions)
Most attractive quadrant
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.

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

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
MiniCPM5-1B (Reasoning)
OpenBMB logoOpenBMB
12
1B
128k
-
-
-
MiniCPM5-1B (Non-reasoning)
OpenBMB logoOpenBMB
12
1B
128k
-
-
-
Nanbeige4.1-3B
Nanbeige logoNanbeige
11
3.9B
256k
-
-
-
NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nano 4B
NVIDIA logoNVIDIA
9
4.0B
262k
-
-
-
Qwen3.5 2B (Reasoning)
Alibaba logoAlibaba
8
2.3B
262k
-
-
-
Ministral 3 3B
Mistral logoMistral
7
3B
256k
$0.1
164
Amazon BedrockMistral
Phi-4 Mini Instruct
Microsoft logoMicrosoft
6
3.8B
128k
-
45
Microsoft Azure
Qwen3.5 2B (Non-reasoning)
Alibaba logoAlibaba
6
2.3B
262k
-
-
-
Qwen3.5 0.8B (Reasoning)
Alibaba logoAlibaba
5
0.9B
262k
-
-
-
Granite 4.1 3B
IBM logoIBM
5
3B
131k
-
-
-
MiniCPM-V 4.6 1.3B
OpenBMB logoOpenBMB
4
1.3B
262k
-
-
-
Jamba Reasoning 3B
AI21 Labs logoAI21 Labs
4
3B
262k
-
-
-