Model comparison

Molmo 2 8b vs o4-mini

o4-mini is the stronger model overall, scoring 41.6 to 39.1 on the Noometry Index.

Last verified . 5 shared benchmarks.

o4-mini OpenAI

41.6

Rank #132 Confirmed

Summary

  • They share 5 benchmarks with published results for both. Molmo 2 8b scores higher in 1 category and o4-mini in 4 categories; 5 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
  • The widest gap is in multimodal, where o4-mini leads 40.2 to 30.2.
  • Molmo 2 8b has downloadable open weights; the other is API-only.

Side by side

Molmo 2 8b and o4-mini specifications
Molmo 2 8bo4-mini
ProviderAllen Institute for AI (Ai2)OpenAI
Noometry Index39.141.6
Released—2025-04-16
WeightsOpenProprietary
Context window—200K
Max output—100K
Input $ / M tokens—$1.10
Output $ / M tokens—$4.40
Results tracked560

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Category by category

Coding Not comparable

Molmo 2 8b: —, o4-mini: 40.9 (#127)

Coding benchmarks
BenchmarkMolmo 2 8bo4-mini
SWE-bench Verified (bash only)—45%
Aider Polyglot—72%
GSO—3.6%
WeirdML—52.6%
LMArena Coding—1368
CadEval—62%
ALE-Bench—826.17
AlgoTune—1.72

Agentic & Tool Use Not comparable

Molmo 2 8b: —, o4-mini: 32.6 (#61)

Agentic & Tool Use benchmarks
BenchmarkMolmo 2 8bo4-mini
Berkeley Function Calling Leaderboard—53.2%
GDPval—25.3%
METR Time Horizons—63.9%

Reasoning Molmo 2 8b leads

Molmo 2 8b: 25.6 (#146), o4-mini: 24.6 (#162)

Reasoning benchmarks
BenchmarkMolmo 2 8bo4-mini
LMArena Hard Prompts12871351
ARC-AGI-2—6.1%
SimpleBench—38.7%
Kagi LLM Benchmark—67.6%
ARC-AGI-1—58.7%
CritPt—0.6%
Chess Puzzles—26%
EnigmaEval—9.2%
Mystery Game Puzzles—5%
DTBench—77.6%
LMCA—26.5%
Epoch Capabilities Index—145.64
ForecastBench—61.8

Math Not comparable

Molmo 2 8b: —, o4-mini: 40.8 (#89)

Knowledge Not comparable

Molmo 2 8b: —, o4-mini: 43.6 (#91)

Knowledge benchmarks
BenchmarkMolmo 2 8bo4-mini
GPQA Diamond—79.6%
Humanity's Last Exam—18.1%
SimpleQA Verified—19.6%
MMLU-Pro—82%
Confabulations—15.8%
Vectara Hallucination Rate—18.6%
GPQA (HELM)—73.5%
LMArena Expert—1343

Multimodal o4-mini leads

Molmo 2 8b: 30.2 (#112), o4-mini: 40.2 (#49)

Multimodal benchmarks
BenchmarkMolmo 2 8bo4-mini
LMArena Vision10811194
GeoBench—64%
VPCT—57.5%

Multilingual o4-mini leads

Molmo 2 8b: 42.7 (#190), o4-mini: 47.0 (#154)

Multilingual benchmarks
BenchmarkMolmo 2 8bo4-mini
LMArena Non-English12761337
LMArena Chinese—1354
LMArena French—1364
LMArena German—1336
LMArena Japanese—1308
LMArena Korean—1312
LMArena Russian—1334
LMArena Spanish—1347

Instruction Following o4-mini leads

Molmo 2 8b: 67.0 (#201), o4-mini: 75.2 (#68)

Instruction Following benchmarks
BenchmarkMolmo 2 8bo4-mini
LMArena Instruction Following12701321
IFEval—92.8%

Long Context Not comparable

Molmo 2 8b: —, o4-mini: 45.5 (#33)

Long Context benchmarks
BenchmarkMolmo 2 8bo4-mini
Fiction.LiveBench—77.8%
LMArena Longer Query—1315

Writing & Preference o4-mini leads

Molmo 2 8b: 49.4 (#191), o4-mini: 54.0 (#152)

Writing & Preference benchmarks
BenchmarkMolmo 2 8bo4-mini
LMArena Text12881353
LMArena Creative Writing—1294
Short-Story Creative Writing—75%
WildBench—85.4%
LMArena Multi-Turn—1350

Frequently asked questions

Is Molmo 2 8b better than o4-mini?

o4-mini is the stronger model overall, scoring 41.6 to 39.1 on the Noometry Index.

How many benchmarks do Molmo 2 8b and o4-mini share?

5 benchmarks have published results for both models. Molmo 2 8b has 5 scored results on Noometry and o4-mini has 60.

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