Earlier quoted context omitted.
Writes pretty engaging prose, finetunes well, now MIT licensed... what's not to like? Oh and very good world knowledge for the size: better than than DS4 Flash
Do people really use 100B+ models for writing? I am no writer but to me it seems like writing is one of the easiest tasks with barely any logic or reasoning and as long as its not longer than a handful of pages I expect even 8B models to perform great.
It's pretty clear you've never experimented with it. Creative writing demands everything the model can do and more, and most problems are still unsolved. It's extremely heavy reasoning-wise, more so than coding (check e.g. Engram paper for some insights), but also needs good scattered retrieval, careful subjective training for prose quality, character, and human likeness, a ton of facts baked in, and much much more. Mode collapse is not solved. No LLM does creative writing well but historically only the absolute largest models were able to do write anything complex more or less convincingly and were creative enough.