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Qwen 3.8

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Re: Qwen 3.8

#71
post #38
post #12

Go China, screw America* *within the scope of open models only

I like my Apache 2.0 licensed Gemma, and NVIDIA’s Nemotrons are decent bases for finetuning or continued pretraining, esp thanks to good documentation and tooling. Oh, and Mira’s thinking machines lab dropped Inkling, a ~1T open weight model too. This isn’t US vs China. This is open vs closed.

It's Sunday morning so I'm allowed to be facetious!

Re: Qwen 3.8

#72

Just imagine Anthropic making Opus open-weights now for the sake of trolling everyone. Wouldn't surprise me at this point xD

That would go against everything that Dario believes in (note that I refer to the CEO and not the company; the staff at Anthropic are not so ridiculous). He believes in Anthropic being the sole arbiter of the forefront of this technology, because it is all too dangerous in the hands of anyone else.

I’ve seen no evidence that he believes in anything. He comes off as just another slimy would-be monopolist to me.

Re: Qwen 3.8

#73
The open weights vs frontier models is reminding me more and more of the Linux vs Windows I grew up with (slashdot randomly popped into my head saying that)

I have a feeling this is the next…frontier of that fight

One can only hope it eventually does as well as Linux

Re: Qwen 3.8

#74
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…

Xi Jinping openly talked about open source at WAIC. So don't think the labs have much a choice now...

Re: Qwen 3.8

#76
post #48
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…

It's important to note there was recently a large AI conference in Shanghai, and Xi Jinping mentioned a commitment to open source AI releases. It is no surprise that Alibaba would want to align.

You can read his speech here: https://www.xinhuanet.com/politics/leaders/20260717/72728b6f... He mentioned open source as one way to stimulate innovation and development, that's all. Also pay attention to the part where he says that misuse needs to be prevented. If unsupervised access to LLMs becomes perceived as undermining state control, no more open weights for you.

Re: Qwen 3.8

#77
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I know this is a bit cliche but I wonder how much headroom there is in the lower parameter count range. Is there any good reason to believe there is a lot of headroom or there is not? I suppose I'm just wondering if this wave of nearly Fable class models will be runnable on ~$10k worth of hardware at reasonable speeds in the near future.

> I suppose I'm just wondering if this wave of nearly Fable class models will be runnable on ~$10k worth of hardware at reasonable speeds in the near future

You're able to run quantized ~100B class models on local hardware today, but still lots of compromises when it comes to quality. I guess it ultimately depends on how far "near future" is, in a year you'd likely be able to run something like 5.6 Terra on local (~10K USD) hardware, but Sol/Fable would still be out of range, and at that point the closed-source labs probably have one or two more iterations put out at that point.

Re: Qwen 3.8

#78
post #6
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…

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.

There’s a Twitter thread making rounds by Dean Ball about deceleration in AI development caused by open models and I can’t understand how people don’t see that it’s true: open models dismantle the frontier lab capex spend potential by reducing the training budget to zero in the limit. Tokens from different providers are not fungible, but customers are nevertheless very price sensitive and close enough is good enough, eg. K3 being opus+ in capability and cheaper than opus per successful task in the long run is an obvious financial decision.

No training budget means deceleration, or at least slower acceleration, margin compression and a completely demolished IPO valuation; path to machine god requires dollars and capable open models externalize training costs to true frontier labs parasitically.

IMHO humanity has a better chance at not destroying itself due to less than breakneck pace - but there’s a chance frontier models get sponsored by the USG and are never released publicly so they can’t be distilled and then what?

Re: Qwen 3.8

#79
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I know this is a bit cliche but I wonder how much headroom there is in the lower parameter count range. Is there any good reason to believe there is a lot of headroom or there is not? I suppose I'm just wondering if this wave of nearly Fable class models will be runnable on ~$10k worth of hardware at reasonable speeds in the near future.

I don’t think you’ll get full Fable performance at that level, at least for a while, but I’ve been watching some of the 1-bit models (e.g. Bonsai) with interest. Perhaps we can drive parameter count up on local models while still keeping memory consumption reasonable for consumer hardware. So, for instance, running models with 1T parameters in 128 GB systems.

Re: Qwen 3.8

#80

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.

I wouldn't call it a moat, but I would call it a noticeably better model. Subjectively, for my own work, I would rate the top models Fable > K3 > Sol. But it's not like Fable is so substantially better than the other two that I would be seriously impacted if I didn't have access to it anymore. All three are amazing models, and of the three, Fable is the only one that regularly triggers refusals.

It's always fun to see what works for others, because for my work it'd have to be Sol > Fable. Fable makes too many mistakes.

Coordinating agents though? Fable any day.

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