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Qwen3-Next

qwen.ai

141–150 of 240 posts

Re: Qwen3-Next

#141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thats not a meaningful question. Models can be quantized to fit into much smaller memory requirements, and not all MoE layers (in MoE models) have to be offloaded to VRAM to maintain performance.

i mean 4bit quantized. i can roughly calculate vram for dense models by model size. but i don't know how to do it for MOE models?

Same calculation, basically. Any given ~30B model is going to use the same VRAM (assuming loading it all into VRAM, which MoEs do not need to do), is going to be the same size

Re: Qwen3-Next

#143
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because if you generate token n+1 with all 48 layers of Qwen3-Next and 80 billion params, and also generate token n+2 with the 1 MTP layer at 2bil params... that n+2 token can be much lower quality than the n+1 token but mostly correct. Let's say you have a model that generates the string "The 44th president of the United States is ___ ___". Your model will generate "Barack" as the n+1 token, and the MTP layer probab…

> Then you just check if "Obama" is correct via the same speculative decoding process, which is a lot faster than if you had to start over from layer 1-48 and generate "Obama" the regular way. That doesn't match my understanding of what speculative decoding does: AFAIK with regular speculative decoding you ask a smaller llm infer the next few tokens (let say 5 tokens) and then, you can have the big model infer token…

Sounds right. The policy for rejection can depend on what you want - you might accept the top K highest probability tokens or top P probability mass. Or you can do something like importance sampling and probabilistically reject based on the ratio of likelihoods

Re: Qwen3-Next

#144
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speculative decoding! It makes inference a LOT faster. Instead of generating tokens one at a time, you generate the second one as well, and then use speculative decoding on that second token (instead of having it be produced by a draft model like Qwen 0.6b). If the token is checked and is correct, then the 2nd token gets generated MUCH faster. If it's wrong, you have to generate it again the normal way (a lot slower…

Because then the second token only needs to be checked, not generated, as it’s already generated? And it’s much faster to generate multiple tokens at the same time than one at a time? Is that the idea? I’m not an expert on LLMs, just a user.

No, the parent is wrong.

Checking a token is the same as generating it.

The benefit however is in the next (third) token. After generating tokens 1 and 2 (in one turn), you start generating token 3 (and 4). You also get the “real” prediction for token 2. If the “real” prediction matches the MTP (Multi-Token Prediction) from previous turn, you have just generated 3 correct tokens (and another speculative). If not, you’ve now corrected token 2, but token 3 is wrong (it follows the wrong token 2) so you need ti generate it again.

Re: Qwen3-Next

#145
post #66

The same week Oracle is forecasting huge data center demand and the stock is rallying. If these 10x gains in efficiency hold true then this could lead to a lot less demand for Nvidia, Oracle, Coreweave etc

If someone had to bet on an AI crash which I imagine would led to unused datacentres and cheap GPUs how would they invest their winnings to exploit these resources?

Buy the application layer near winners. When computing costs shrink, usage expands.

Re: Qwen3-Next

#146
would be interesting how they compare to gpt-oss-120b. The latter one runs also very fast and pricing is currently much better than qwen3-next on many providers. Would expect that if this model is such fast pricing should be similar or even lower.

Re: Qwen3-Next

#147
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speculative decoding! It makes inference a LOT faster. Instead of generating tokens one at a time, you generate the second one as well, and then use speculative decoding on that second token (instead of having it be produced by a draft model like Qwen 0.6b). If the token is checked and is correct, then the 2nd token gets generated MUCH faster. If it's wrong, you have to generate it again the normal way (a lot slower…

Because then the second token only needs to be checked, not generated, as it’s already generated? And it’s much faster to generate multiple tokens at the same time than one at a time? Is that the idea? I’m not an expert on LLMs, just a user.

It relies on an “unintuitive observation”[0] that you can run batches basically for free (up to a limit). So if you only run one inference, you batch it plus a lot of guesses and, if you guess right, can speed up the inference by the number of guesses. If you guess wrong, you're back to regular speed (and still fully correct).

[0] https://x.com/karpathy/status/1697318534555336961

Re: Qwen3-Next

#148
post #5

Coolest part of Qwen3-Next, in my opinion, (after the linear attention parts) is that they do MTP without adding another un-embedding matrix. Deepseek R1 also has a MTP layer (layer 61) https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-R1/blob/main/mod... But Deepseek R1 adds embed_tokens and shared_head.head tensors, which are [129280, 7168] or about 2GB in size at FP8. Qwen3-Next doesn't have that: https://huggingface.co…

Could someone kindly point to a convenient all-on-one ELI5 of all these words? :')

The following was generated by chatG5:

    Qwen3-Next — A family of large language models from Qwen (Alibaba).  
    DeepSeek R1 — Another large open-source language model from DeepSeek AI.  
    Linear attention — A type of transformer attention that scales linearly with sequence length, making long-context processing cheaper.  
    MTP (Multi-Token Prediction) — Training/inference trick where the model predicts multiple future tokens at once, speeding things up.  
    Embedding — Converts words/tokens into vectors (numbers) the model can work with.  
    Un-embedding — The reverse step: mapping the model’s internal vector back into tokens.  
    embed_tokens — The big lookup table of embeddings (token → vector).  
    shared_head.head tensors — Extra weight matrices used for prediction; they can be huge.  
    [129280, 7168] — The shape of such a tensor: ~129k rows (tokens in the vocab) × 7k columns (hidden dimension).  
    FP8 — Floating-point format using 8 bits (compact, faster, less precise).  
    Active parameters — The weights that actually need to be loaded in GPU memory to run the model.  
    Inference — Running the model to generate text (as opposed to training it).  
    GB savings — If you avoid duplicating giant matrices, you save GPU memory and speed things up.

Re: Qwen3-Next

#149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are nearly infinitely far away from saturating compute demand for inference. Case in point; I'd like something that realtime assesses all the sensors and API endpoints of stuff in my home and as needed bubbles up summaries, diaries, and emergency alerts. Right now that's probably a single H200, and well out of my "value range". The number of people in the world that do this now at scale is almost certainly less th…

absolutely nobody wants or needs a fucking thermostat diary lmao, and the few ppl that do will have zero noticeable impact on world's compute demands, i'm begging ppl in on hn to touch grass or speak to an average person every now and then lol

You wouldn't even know that it existed, or how it worked. It would just work. Everybody wants hands off control that they don't have to think or learn about.

edit: this reminds me of a state agency I once worked for who fired their only IT guy after they moved offices, because the servers were running just fine without him. It was a Kafkaesque trauma for him for a moment, but a massive raise a week later when they were renegotiating for him to come back.

Re: Qwen3-Next

#150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could someone kindly point to a convenient all-on-one ELI5 of all these words? :')

Background: LLMs take your input, upscale it into a very high dimensional space, and then downscale it back to 1D at the end. This 1D list is interpreted as a list of probabilities -- one for each word in your vocabulary. i.e f(x) = downscale(upscale(x)). Each of downscale() and upscale() are parameterized (billions of params). I see you have a gamedev background, so as an example: bezier curves are parameterized fun…

so after your edit it would be (just to clarify):

    I use ____ ___ = downscale_common(lightweight1(.)) + downscale_common(lightweight2(.)) ?
And does it generate 2 at a time and keep going that way, or is there some overlap?
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