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Qwen3.6-Plus: Towards real world agents

qwen.ai

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Re: Qwen3.6-Plus: Towards real world agents

#11

Post by Aurornis »

This is their hosted-only model, not an open weight model like they’ve become known for. They got a lot of good publicity for their open weight model releases, which was the goal. The hard part is pivoting from an open weight provider to being considered as a competitor to Claude and ChatGPT. Initial reactions are mostly anger from everyone who didn’t realize that the play along was to give away the smaller models as advertising, not because they were feeling generous.

Comparing to Opus 4.5 instead of the current 4.6 and other last-gen models is clearly an attempt to deceive, which isn’t winning them any points either.

I think there is a moderately large market for models like this that aren’t quite SOTA level but can be served up much cheaper. I don’t know how successful they’ll be in the race to the bottom in this market niche, though. Most users of cheap API tokens are not loyal to any brand and will change providers overnight each time someone releases a slightly better model.

Re: Qwen3.6-Plus: Towards real world agents

#12

Post by deaux »

pferdone wrote: post #6
jgbuddy wrote: post #3

Worth noting that this model, unlike almost all qwen models, is not open-weight, nor is the parameter count exposed. Also odd that it is compared against opus 4.5 even though 4.6 was released like 2 months ago.

They said in the last paragraph[0]: "[...] In the coming days, we will also open-source smaller-scale variants, reaffirming our commitment to accessibility and community-driven innovation. [...]" [0] https://qwen.ai/blog?id=qwen3.6#summary--future-work

> we will also open-source smaller-scale variants

In other words, like GP said, this Qwen3.6-Plus model is not open-weight unlike the other Qwen models.

Re: Qwen3.6-Plus: Towards real world agents

#15

Post by eis »

Quite strong results in the benchmarks but why Gemini 3 Pro instead of 3.1? Why only for a few of the benchmarks? Why is OpenAI not there in the coding benchmarks? Why Opus 4.5 and not 4.6? Just jumps out into my eye as a bit strange.

As always, we'll have to try and see how it performs in the real world but the open weight models of Qwen were pretty decent for some tasks so still excited to see what this brings.

Re: Qwen3.6-Plus: Towards real world agents

#16

Post by pferdone »

deaux wrote: post #12
pferdone wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They said in the last paragraph[0]: "[...] In the coming days, we will also open-source smaller-scale variants, reaffirming our commitment to accessibility and community-driven innovation. [...]" [0] https://qwen.ai/blog?id=qwen3.6#summary--future-work

> we will also open-source smaller-scale variants In other words, like GP said, this Qwen3.6-Plus model is not open-weight unlike the other Qwen models.

> unlike almost all qwen models

Almost all means there have been ones before that were not open. So, no contradiction there.

Re: Qwen3.6-Plus: Towards real world agents

#17

Post by cubefox »

Aurornis wrote: post #11

This is their hosted-only model, not an open weight model like they’ve become known for. They got a lot of good publicity for their open weight model releases, which was the goal. The hard part is pivoting from an open weight provider to being considered as a competitor to Claude and ChatGPT. Initial reactions are mostly anger from everyone who didn’t realize that the play along was to give away the smaller models as…

> I think there is a moderately large market for models like this that aren’t quite SOTA level but can be served up much cheaper.

There isn't, pretty much everyone wants the best of the best.

Re: Qwen3.6-Plus: Towards real world agents

#18

Post by scoopdewoop »

cubefox wrote: post #17
Aurornis wrote: post #11

This is their hosted-only model, not an open weight model like they’ve become known for. They got a lot of good publicity for their open weight model releases, which was the goal. The hard part is pivoting from an open weight provider to being considered as a competitor to Claude and ChatGPT. Initial reactions are mostly anger from everyone who didn’t realize that the play along was to give away the smaller models as…

> I think there is a moderately large market for models like this that aren’t quite SOTA level but can be served up much cheaper. There isn't, pretty much everyone wants the best of the best.

That isn't true. In a Codex or Claude Code instance, sure... but those are not the main users of APIs. If you are using LLMs in a service for customers, costs matter.

Re: Qwen3.6-Plus: Towards real world agents

#19

Post by Aurornis »

cubefox wrote: post #17
Aurornis wrote: post #11

This is their hosted-only model, not an open weight model like they’ve become known for. They got a lot of good publicity for their open weight model releases, which was the goal. The hard part is pivoting from an open weight provider to being considered as a competitor to Claude and ChatGPT. Initial reactions are mostly anger from everyone who didn’t realize that the play along was to give away the smaller models as…

> I think there is a moderately large market for models like this that aren’t quite SOTA level but can be served up much cheaper. There isn't, pretty much everyone wants the best of the best.

The market for API tokens is bigger than people like you and I (who also want the best) using then for code.

There are a lot of data science problems that benefit from running the dataset through an LLM, which becomes bottlenecked on per-token costs. For these you take a sample subset and run it against multiple providers and then do a cost versus accuracy tradeoff.

The market for API tokens is not just people using OpenCode and similar tools.

Re: Qwen3.6-Plus: Towards real world agents

#20

Post by rvz »

daft_pink wrote: post #13

Not really interested in using models hosted on alibaba cloud. Like Qwen local for it’s privacy, but I trust the privacy of Google/OpenAI/Anthropic more than alibaba.

> Like Qwen local for it’s privacy, but I trust the privacy of Google/OpenAI/Anthropic more than alibaba.

None should be trusted, unless you are running them locally.

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