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Qwen 3.8

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Re: Qwen 3.8

#51

Post by embedding-shape »

docheinestages wrote: post #49

Qwen has set an excellent track record for architecting and releasing open-weight models that consumer-grade devices can run. What is needed the most right now is something similar to Bonsai 27B, with a modest memory footprint, but faster and more capable. On-device models can make up for intelligence by being faster, thinking longer, or doing more quick iteration rounds.

> What is needed the most right now is something similar to Bonsai 27B, with a modest memory footpint, but faster and more capable

Yeah, that'd be neat, but that's not what this announcement is about at all:

> With a massive 2.4T parameters

Re: Qwen 3.8

#52

Post by embedding-shape »

mft_ wrote: post #32
nsbk wrote: post #19

Bring it on! Hoping that they release smaller sizes of Qwen3.8. I use the 35B MoE and 27B dense models locally and most of the time I don’t need to reach out to Claude. Extremely useful specially when requests include sensitive and/or personal data

I think everyone is hoping this! It would be great if they'd release an MoE model somewhere between the 35B size of 3.6 and the 122B version of 3.5 - it could be a great balance of speed and ability for people with reasonably powerful but not insane home computers.

> the 122B version of 3.5

Yeah, this is what I'm holding out for, the NVFP4 variant of 3.5 122B is blazing fast with reasonable quality and even with max context fits perfectly within 96GB.

Re: Qwen 3.8

#53

Post by dgellow »

hodgehog11 wrote: post #14

The "second only to Fable 5" comment is pretty telling here. I remember early on when a lot of naysayers were saying that Fable was barely an improvement on Opus. Like it or not, Anthropic have a genuine moat right now with that model, provided they continue to allow people to use it. It will be genuinely exciting when an open model is able to beat it.

That’s not a moat though

Re: Qwen 3.8

#54

Post by storus »

adrian_b wrote: post #4

I assume that this announcement has been prompted by that of Moonshot AI, which has just announced a 2.8T parameter open-weights LLM, Kimi K3, to be published on Huggingface by 27 July. Now the response of Alibaba is that they will also publish soon a big open weights LLM, the 2.4T parameter Qwen 3.8. I wonder if Alibaba has always planned to make this big LLM open weights, or they have chosen to do this now, to bett…

I would rather see them releasing 3.7-27B, 3.7-122B or their 3.8 versions. Qwen/QwQ were always about the best available local inference at home.

Re: Qwen 3.8

#55

Post by nsbk »

psychoslave wrote: post #30
nsbk wrote: post #19

Bring it on! Hoping that they release smaller sizes of Qwen3.8. I use the 35B MoE and 27B dense models locally and most of the time I don’t need to reach out to Claude. Extremely useful specially when requests include sensitive and/or personal data

What hardware do you have?

I run a 2x 3090 rig, but a single 3090 already provides a great experience at a reasonable quant and context size. On a single card I used to run Qwen_Qwen3.6-27B-Q4_K_M or similarly quantized 35B MoE at 65536 context size

Re: Qwen 3.8

#56

Post by docheinestages »

embedding-shape wrote: post #51
docheinestages wrote: post #49

Qwen has set an excellent track record for architecting and releasing open-weight models that consumer-grade devices can run. What is needed the most right now is something similar to Bonsai 27B, with a modest memory footprint, but faster and more capable. On-device models can make up for intelligence by being faster, thinking longer, or doing more quick iteration rounds.

> What is needed the most right now is something similar to Bonsai 27B, with a modest memory footpint, but faster and more capable Yeah, that'd be neat, but that's not what this announcement is about at all: > With a massive 2.4T parameters

True. It was more of an open letter, with hopes that the Qwen team sees the comments in this thread.

Re: Qwen 3.8

#57

Post by embedding-shape »

Matl wrote: post #22
gardnr wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard to say what their motivation is. The Chinese firms seem to be working hard to commoditize intelligence which may be the most effective way to debase American frontier labs. And yeah: it also happens to be really good for humanity.

> It's hard to say what their motivation is. Not that hard to say IMO, they basically see models becoming a commodity and see value in the applications on top of them. So if Alibaba Cloud is the best place to build applications on top of Qwen, why not give the model itself away?

> Not that hard to say IMO,

Unless you work there, your opinions are guesses, and parent is saying we cannot know, which remains true even with your guesses :)

Re: Qwen 3.8

#58

Post by storus »

SwellJoe wrote: post #34

Qwen is the most censored of the Chinese models in my testing, which makes me wonder in what other ways it is compromised. Open weights doesn't really reveal what's in there. And, in my tests, existing Qwen models are not at the pareto frontier of any metric; DeepSeek V4 Pro is better, faster, and much cheaper than Qwen 3.7 Max. (DeepSeek is also among the least censored of the Chinese models.) I guess we'll see if t…

DeepSeek V4 hallucinates like crazy and often forgets explicitly mentioned parts of the context. I guess compressing tokens and cherry-picking attention comes at a cost.

Re: Qwen 3.8

#59

Post by revolvingthrow »

DanielHB wrote: post #46
hodgehog11 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is pretty safe to say at this point that having large open LLM models available is better for humanity than them remaining proprietary. Echoing Linus Torvalds' recent comments, AI is genuinely useful right now, and is here to stay in one form or another.

The fear is not about the models open weights it is the erosion of training capability in other countries. Why train models when they do it for free? Until they don't of course, or they start doing what the US is doing right now by locking out some models to government only or internal market only. What people should be afraid is the rug pull.

While a valid point, China also produces plenty of whitepapers going about the architecture and know how about the training and inference itself.

There’s also the fact that unless LLMs do get to AGI (which seems… doubtful, still) there comes a point where a model is good enough for what you need. Fable and gpt 5.6 are certainly pretty neat, but I’ve been happy since opus 4.6. I’d still choose a better model, obviously, but it’s not the end of the world if I was stuck with 4.6 for a while when it already lets me get the end result at acceptable quality.

It also needs to be said that the "erosion of training capability in other countries" is largely theoretical, given that Mistral hasn’t been keeping up and other countries don’t even have anything worth mentioning. You’d first need to _have_ training capability to lose it.

Re: Qwen 3.8

#60

Post by traceroute66 »

zapkyeskrill wrote: post #44
dannyw wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In China, you can’t officially use US APIs. The world saw a taste of this with Fable, but in China, this has been the situation all along. So it’s not a surprise why open weights are so cherished. As frontier models continue to block everyday individuals from securing their own codebase, I expect the adoption and usage of open weights to continue. As an example, HuggingFace recently was investigating a security incid…

How does this explain open weights? They could easily take the same closed route like their American friends

> How does this explain open weights? They could easily take the same closed route like their American friends

Because they are playing the Americans at their own game.

What is the first thing an American company would do ?

Spread the old American classic FUD ... "you can't used this closed tool because its run by the communists", right ?

So you release it as open weights which is a win-win. Global adoption of the model and you get to give the American AI companies a kick in the nuts because you know they will never release open weights apart from highly quantised crippled shit.

The Chinese are also playing the long game. The gradual rebalancing of the world from the US-centric model of the past. If releasing models as open weights is part of that long game, then so be it.

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