Work · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Jan-nano, 4B agentic model that outperforms DeepSeek-v3-671B using MCP
We’ve been experimenting with how far a tiny model can go when it’s good at calling external tools - and have just released Jan-nano, a 4 B model trained for MCP. Jan-nano: - tops DeepSeek-V3-671B on MCP tool-use (SimpleQA 80.7%) - handles live web search and multi-step deep research - runs fully on-device (≈4GB VRAM) Tech notes - Base: Qwen3-4B - Fine-tuning: DAPO - We're going to release the full technical report soon Links - Demo tweet: https://x.com/menloresearch/status/1934809407604576559 - Model + GGUF:…
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Prices are shown for the 2 we have checked on their own sites, 2 of them free or with a free tier.
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Announcing GPT-4.1, GPT-4.1 mini, & GPT-4.1 nano in the API
2025 · openai.com · its alternatives →
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Fast and efficient models optimized for coding and subagents
Mar 2026 · openai.com · its alternatives →
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DeepSeek-V4▲387The open-source era of 1M context intelligence
Apr 2026 · huggingface.co · its alternatives →
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Hey HN, Henry here from Cactus. We open-sourced Needle, a 26M parameter function-calling (tool use) model. It runs at 6000 tok/s prefill and 1200 tok/s decode on consumer devices. We were always frustrated by the little effort made towards building agentic models that run on budget phones, so we conducted investigations that led to an observation: agentic experiences are built upon tool calling, and massive models are overkill for it. Tool calling is fundamentally retrieval-and-assembly (match query to tool name, extract argument values, emit JSON), not reasoning. Cross-attention…
May 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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mcp-usefree tier, from $25/mo▲581Hi HN, Luigi here. We maintain mcp-use an open-source TypeScript framework for building MCP servers and MCP Apps: https://github.com/mcp-use/mcp-use MCP is now (finally) stateless so we rewrote mcp-use v2 from scratch for the 2026-07-28 MCP spec revision: https://blog.modelcontextprotocol.io/posts/2026-07-28/ Thanks to the rebuild: - Throughput: +27% → from 8,615 to 10,982 median ops/sec - Cold launch: 2.2x faster → from 151.6 ms to 68.1 ms - Clean install: 82% smaller → from 404.6 MiB to 74.4 MiB Benchmark with methodology here:…
2025 · manufact.com · its alternatives →
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DeepSeek-V3.1▲417The best-performing and best of value open-source AI model
2025 · chat.deepseek.com · its alternatives →
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We recently used DeepSeek V4 Flash as a teacher for finance tasks with GPT-OSS-120B. Distillation works well on this problem. At a constrained 8k token budget, our self-distilled 120B scores 83.61% on FinanceReasoning, above Kimi K3 (81.93%) and Inkling (65.13%). We released the 20B open weights. With V4 as the teacher though, we realized it would be timely to measure if the censorship characteristic of it transferred to the distilled version of the base model. tl;dr it didn't, the teacher answered politically sensitive questions 7 SDs differently than expected, but the distilled model's…
Jul 2026 · ctgt.ai · its alternatives →
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Ollama v0.19▲410Massive local model speedup on Apple Silicon with MLX
Apr 2026 · ollama.com · its alternatives →
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Nano Banana 2▲416Hi HN — I’m an indie developer. I built Nano Banana 2 Playground, a simple web demo for generating images from text and transforming existing images (image-to-image). My goal was a fast, minimal UI that lets you iterate on prompts quickly and compare results without extra friction. I’d love feedback on: Prompt UX (what feels missing/confusing) Which controls/presets are actually useful How to communicate limitations and expected results clearly Thanks for taking a look — happy to answer questions and improve it based on your suggestions.
Feb 2026 · blog.google · its alternatives →
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Qwen3.5 Small▲3550.8B-9B native multimodal w/ more intelligence, less compute
Mar 2026 · huggingface.co · its alternatives →
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Netmind Power▲272Hi HN, We just opened public access to Qwen3‑Coder‑480B‑A35B‑Instruct via a REST/SDK API. Why it might be interesting: - Fully open-source (Apache‑2.0): https://github.com/QwenLM/Qwen3-Coder - 480B params (35B active MoE), long context up to 1M tokens with YaRN - Matches Claude Sonnet/GPT‑4o on SWE-Bench Verified (81.6%) - Free tier: 100K tokens/month
2023 · netmind.ai · its alternatives →
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Frontier agent intelligence at Flash prices
Aug 2026 · huggingface.co · its alternatives →
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I wanted to share our new speech to text model, and the library to use them effectively. We're a small startup (six people, sub-$100k monthly GPU budget) so I'm proud of the work the team has done to create streaming STT models with lower word-error rates than OpenAI's largest Whisper model. Admittedly Large v3 is a couple of years old, but we're near the top the HF OpenASR leaderboard, even up against Nvidia's Parakeet family. Anyway, I'd love to get feedback on the models and software, and hear about what people might build with it.
Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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DSH Desktopfree▲176Official app for DeepSeek’s open-source agent harness
24d ago · deepseek.com · its alternatives →
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Last week was big for open source LLMs. We got: - Qwen 2.5 VL (72b and 32b) - Gemma-3 (27b) - DeepSeek-v3-0324 And a couple weeks ago we got the new mistral-ocr model. We updated our OCR benchmark to include the new models. We evaluated 1,000 documents for JSON extraction accuracy. Major takeaways: - Qwen 2.5 VL (72b and 32b) are by far the most impressive. Both landed right around 75% accuracy (equivalent to GPT-4o’s performance). Qwen 72b was only 0.4% above 32b. Within the margin of error. - Both Qwen models passed mistral-ocr (72.2%), which is specifically trained for OCR. - Gemma-3…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Long-context efficiency with DeepSeek Sparse Attention
2025 · huggingface.co · its alternatives →
- 20MP
Aug 2026 · deepgrove.ai · its alternatives →
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MiniMax M2.5▲194The first open model to beat Sonnet made for productivity
Feb 2026 · minimax.io · its alternatives →
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Ollama for classical ML models. AOT compiler that turns XGBoost, LightGBM, scikit-learn, CatBoost & ONNX models into native C99 inference code. One command to load, one command to serve. 336x faster than Python inference. - kossisoroyce/timber
Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Fabraix▲196We built Adversarial Cost to Exploit (ACE), a benchmark that measures the token expenditure an autonomous adversary must invest to breach an LLM agent. Instead of binary pass/fail, ACE quantifies adversarial effort in dollars, enabling game-theoretic analysis of when an attack is economically rational. We tested six budget-tier models (Gemini Flash-Lite, DeepSeek v3.2, Mistral Small 4, Grok 4.1 Fast, GPT-5.4 Nano, Claude Haiku 4.5) with identical agent configs and an autonomous red-teaming attacker. Haiku 4.5 was an order of magnitude harder to break than every other model; $10.21 mean…
May 2026 · fabraix.com · its alternatives →
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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →