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Qwen3.6-Max-Preview: Smarter, Sharper, Still Evolving

qwen.ai

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Re: Qwen3.6-Max-Preview: Smarter, Sharper, Still Evolving

#81

Post by qalmakka »

zozbot234 wrote: post #69
qalmakka wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they're in a win-win situation. Big AI companies would love to see local computing die in favour of the cloud because they are well aware the moment an open model that can run on non ludicrous consumer hardware appears, they're screwed. In this situation Nvidia, AMD and the like would be the only ones profiting from it - even though I'm not convinced they'd prefer going back to fighting for B2C while B2B Is s…

If you want to run AI models at scale and with reasonably quick response, there's not many alternatives to datacenter hardware. Consumer hardware is great for repurposing existing "free" compute (including gaming PCs, pro workstations etc. at the higher end) and for basic insurance against rug pulls from the big AI vendors, but increased scale will probably still bring very real benefits.

Currently, yes. But I don't find it hard to imagine that in a while we could get reasonably light open models with a level of reasoning similar to current opus, for instance. In such a scenario how many people would opt to pay for a way more expensive cloud subscription? Especially since lots of people are already not that interested in paying for frontier models nowadays where it makes sense. Unless keep on getting a constant, never ending stream of improvements we're basically bound to get to a point where unless you really need it you are ok with the basic, cheaper local alternative you don't have to pay for monthly.

Re: Qwen3.6-Max-Preview: Smarter, Sharper, Still Evolving

#83

Post by OtomotO »

alex7o wrote: post #71

Ok I find it funny that people compare models and are like, opus 4.7 is SOTA and is much better etc, but I have used glm 5.1 (I assume this comes form them training on both opus and codex) for things opus couldn't do and have seen it make better code, haven't tried the qwen max series but I have seen the local 122b model do smarter more correct things based on docs than opus so yes benchmarks are one thing but realit…

Many people averted religion (which I can get behind with), but have never removed the dogmatic thinking that lay at its root.

As so many things these days: It's a cult.

I've used Claude for many months now. Since February I see a stark decline in the work I do with it.

I've also tried to use it for GPU programming where it absolutely sucks at, with Sonnet, Opus 4.5 and 4.6

But if you share that sentiment, it's always a "You're just holding it wrong" or "The next model will surely solve this"

For me it's just a tool, so I shrug.

Re: Qwen3.6-Max-Preview: Smarter, Sharper, Still Evolving

#84

Post by thesz »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #58
ninjahawk1 wrote: post #29

The way to develop in this space seems to be to give away free stuff, get your name out there, then make everything proprietary. I hope they still continue releasing open weights. The day no one releases open weights is a sad day for humanity. Normal people won’t own their own compute if that ever happens.

I'm a little more optimistic than that. I suspect that the open-weight models we already have are going to be enough to support incremental development of new ones, using reasonably-accessible levels of compute. The idea that every new foundation model needs to be pretrained from scratch, using warehouses of GPUs to crunch the same 50 terabytes of data from the same original dumps of Common Crawl and various Russian…

Change layer size and you have to retrain. Change number of layers and you have to retrain. Change tokenization and you have to retrain.

Re: Qwen3.6-Max-Preview: Smarter, Sharper, Still Evolving

#85

Post by OtomotO »

WarmWash wrote: post #66
ninjahawk1 wrote: post #29

The way to develop in this space seems to be to give away free stuff, get your name out there, then make everything proprietary. I hope they still continue releasing open weights. The day no one releases open weights is a sad day for humanity. Normal people won’t own their own compute if that ever happens.

The Chinese state wants the world using their models. People think that Chinese AI labs are just super cool bros that love sharing for free. The don't understand it's just a state sponsored venture meant to further entrench China in global supply and logistics. China's VCs are Chinese banks and a sprinkle of "private" money. Private in quotes because technically it still belongs to the state anyway. China doesn't hav…

So an OPEN model that I can run on my own fucking hardware will entrench China in global supply and logistics how?

Contrary: How will the closed, proprietary models from Anthropic, "Open"AI and Co. lead us all to freedom? Freedom of what exactly? Freedom of my money?

At some point this "anti-communism" bullshit propaganda has to stop. And that moment was decades ago!

Re: Qwen3.6-Max-Preview: Smarter, Sharper, Still Evolving

#86

Post by WarmWash »

zozbot234 wrote: post #73
WarmWash wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Chinese state wants the world using their models. People think that Chinese AI labs are just super cool bros that love sharing for free. The don't understand it's just a state sponsored venture meant to further entrench China in global supply and logistics. China's VCs are Chinese banks and a sprinkle of "private" money. Private in quotes because technically it still belongs to the state anyway. China doesn't hav…

I'm not sure how local AI models are meant to "entrench China in global supply and logistics". The two areas have nothing to do with one another. You can easily run a Chinese open model on all-American hardware.

They are building a pipeline, and the goal is to get people in the door.

If you forever stand at the entrance eating the free samples, that's fine, they don't care. Other people are going through the door and you are still consuming what they feed you. Doesn't mean it's going to be bad or evil, but they are staking their territory of control.

Re: Qwen3.6-Max-Preview: Smarter, Sharper, Still Evolving

#87

Post by embedding-shape »

wg0 wrote: post #82

Notice the pattern that Chinese providers are now: 1. Keeping models closed source. 2. Jacking up pricing. A lot. Sometimes up to 100% increase.

Huh yeah, that's truly a unique trait these Chinese companies don't share with companies in other countries.

Re: Qwen3.6-Max-Preview: Smarter, Sharper, Still Evolving

#88

Post by SwellJoe »

jjice wrote: post #2

With them comparing to Opus 4.5, I find it hard to take some of these in good faith. Opus 4.7 is new, so I don't expect that, but Opus 4.6 has been out for quite some time.

The thing is, Opus 4.5 is where the model reached Good Enough, at least for a wide variety of problems I use LLMs for. Before that, I almost never thought it was a more productive use of my time to use AI for development tasks, because it would always hallucinate something that would waste a bunch of my time. It just wasn't a good trade.

But, if for some reason everything stopped at Opus 4.5 level and we never got a better model (and 4.6/4.7 are better, if only marginally so and mostly expanding the kind of work it can do rather than making it better at making web apps), we could still do a lot of real work real fast with Opus 4.5, and software development would never go back to everyone handwriting most of the code.

A model as good as Opus 4.5 (or slightly better according to the mostly easily gamed benchmarks) at a 10th the price is probably a worthwhile proposition for a lot of people. $100 a month, or more, to get Opus 4.7 is well worth it for a western developer...the time the lower-end models waste is far more expensive than the cost of using the most expensive models. For the foreseeable future, I'll keep paying a premium for the models that waste less of my time and produce better results with less prodding.

But, also, it's wild how fast things move. Open models you can run on relatively modest hardware are competitive with frontier models of two years ago. I mean, you can run Qwen 3.6 MoE 35B A3B or the larger Gemma 4 models on normal hardware, like a beefy Macbook or a Strix Halo or any recentish 24GB/32GB GPU...not much more expensive than the average developer laptop of pre-AI times. And, it can write code. It can write decent prose (Qwen is maybe better at code, Gemma definitely has better prose), they can use tools, they have a big enough context window for real work. They aren't as good as Opus 4.5, yet.

Anyway, I use several models at this point, for security and code reviews, even if Claude Code with Opus is still obviously the best option for most software development tasks. I'll give Qwen a try, too. I like their small models, which punch well above their weight, I'll probably like the big one, too.

Re: Qwen3.6-Max-Preview: Smarter, Sharper, Still Evolving

#90

Post by AnonymousPlanet »

Aurornis wrote: post #43
0xbadcafebee wrote: post #21

Everybody's out here chasing SOTA, meanwhile I'm getting all my coding done with MiniMax M2.5 in multiple parallel sessions for $10/month and never running into limits.

For serious work, the difference between spending $10/month and $100/month is not even worth considering for most professional developers. There are exceptions like students and people in very low income countries, but I’m always confused by developers with in careers where six figure salaries are normal who are going cheap on tools. I find even the SOTA models to be far away from trustworthy for anything beyond thro…

For actually serious work, it's a stark difference if your proprietary and security relevant code is sent abroad to a foreign, possibly future hostile country, or is sent to some data center around the corner. It doesn't even need to be defence related.
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