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Qwen3.8-Max: A New Bar for Coding and Cowork

qwen.ai

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Re: Qwen3.8-Max: A New Bar for Coding and Cowork

#61

Post by nozzlegear »

pettijohn wrote: post #37
nozzlegear wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Qwen3.6-35B is my daily driver for AI, and what convinced me to cancel my Claude subscription back in April. The Qwen3.6 line is easily the best local model I've tried, and I've tried a lot. I've got it diligently grinding away on my laptop right now, reviewing and fixing some bugs in my F# code.

35B MoE is certainly a good and fast local model. I find 27B dense to be quite a bit smarter, so I daily drive that. I wish there was a ~100B MoE with maybe 10B active. It would be super smart and fast!

I've heard 27B is smarter! I tried it some time ago but couldn't get it working with my oMLX. I need to try it again.

Re: Qwen3.8-Max: A New Bar for Coding and Cowork

#62

Post by usef- »

MangoCoffee wrote: post #31
adi2907 wrote: post #20

Once OpenAI and Anthropic are public, every such announcement will become a reliable sell signal

US AI labs really rub me the wrong way, especially with the doom and scare tactics they use. Both Altman and Dario keep talking about how AI will replace workers and how we should regulate LLMs for national security, Dario’s main point. LLMs are useful. We can all see that in agentic coding. But replacing everyone’s job? Hardly. And what’s with the scare tactic of trying to get the US government to ban foreign models…

If there are genuine society risks in a tech I don't want to discourage CEOs from talking about them. I feel like we've spent decades talking about how evil chemical companies (etc.) were about covering up issues in the 20th century. But yes, that's different to being a reason to ban external models.

Re: Qwen3.8-Max: A New Bar for Coding and Cowork

#63

Post by htrp »

kopirgan wrote: post #53

Can a model be stripped off anything not relevant to coding and get a lot lighter? Or is that impossible? Just like we have professors with specialisation wondering if AI models can also be so.

You can... but the trick is to do so without killing performance. Turns out a lot of random things help make coding performance good.

Re: Qwen3.8-Max: A New Bar for Coding and Cowork

#64

Post by usef- »

EMIRELADERO wrote: post #58
MangoCoffee wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

US AI labs really rub me the wrong way, especially with the doom and scare tactics they use. Both Altman and Dario keep talking about how AI will replace workers and how we should regulate LLMs for national security, Dario’s main point. LLMs are useful. We can all see that in agentic coding. But replacing everyone’s job? Hardly. And what’s with the scare tactic of trying to get the US government to ban foreign models…

You are right to feel that way about the frontier labs, especially Anthropic. From https://stratechery.com/2026/anthropics-safety-superpower/ > "Anthropic believes that they are the ones who should have final say over how Anthropic is used; given that they think only they should be developing leading edge AI, they by extension think that only they should have final say over AI generally. When you further combine this…

To be fair, we're simultaneously mocking anthropic for believing in safety so much and also for them thinking they're the only ones that care enough about it. It's true that no one else seems to care as much. Judging by reactions from everyone, all their safety talk is very bad PR.

Re: Qwen3.8-Max: A New Bar for Coding and Cowork

#65

Post by codedokode »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #55
simonw wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... other comments were right, this is the full qwen3.8-max model, two weeks ago was the qwen3.8-max-preview release. Here's a pelican I just got out of the new model. It took 11 minutes and forgot the wheels! https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer#url=ht... (scroll to bottom) The reasoning trace is pretty great: > More additions: basket with fish in it? Cute detail — a fish poking out of a basket on t…

It gave the svg for the wheels in the reasoning trace then forgot to include them in its final answer. Lol.

It has a "definition" for wheel in SVG inside , but did not use it in the picture.

Re: Qwen3.8-Max: A New Bar for Coding and Cowork

#66

Post by gr_norm »

adi2907 wrote: post #20

Once OpenAI and Anthropic are public, every such announcement will become a reliable sell signal

Agree, I don't necessarily see a strong argument favoring OpenAI or Anthropic here. In the interest of perspective, can anyone (perhaps playing devil's advocate) give one?

The open models are now good enough for what I want to do with them, let alone any future improvements. And factoring in efficiency gains, a model in the ~70b range starting to satisfy my needs would completely obviate the need to pay others for inference. This does not seem far-fetched to me, comparing with where open models were at this time last year. What am I missing?

Re: Qwen3.8-Max: A New Bar for Coding and Cowork

#67

Post by storus »

I think the window for a ban of open weight models is closing fast so let's hope US administration is going to miss it and we get Fable-level models (at least in some aspects) with open weights without infringing any newly introduced law as a long-term local baseline.

Re: Qwen3.8-Max: A New Bar for Coding and Cowork

#68

Post by [deleted] »

neumann wrote: post #34
nozzlegear wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Qwen3.6-35B is my daily driver for AI, and what convinced me to cancel my Claude subscription back in April. The Qwen3.6 line is easily the best local model I've tried, and I've tried a lot. I've got it diligently grinding away on my laptop right now, reviewing and fixing some bugs in my F# code.

compared to claude - how 'fast' is it in terms of throughput on your laptop?

[deleted]

Re: Qwen3.8-Max: A New Bar for Coding and Cowork

#69

Post by mathieudombrock »

toshinoriyagi wrote: post #8

They've also announced Qwen3.8-27B being released open-weight next week. Qwen3.6-27B is widely regarded as one of the best local models, especially since nothing else comes close to it, that isn't benchmaxxed, without being significantly larger. If 3.8 truly improves upon it that would be awesome.

Qwen 3.6 27b has been the sweet spot for me in terms of local models. I've had good luck using it with Pi harness. Looking forward to this.

Re: Qwen3.8-Max: A New Bar for Coding and Cowork

#70

Post by brucehoult »

neumann wrote: post #34
nozzlegear wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Qwen3.6-35B is my daily driver for AI, and what convinced me to cancel my Claude subscription back in April. The Qwen3.6 line is easily the best local model I've tried, and I've tried a lot. I've got it diligently grinding away on my laptop right now, reviewing and fixing some bugs in my F# code.

compared to claude - how 'fast' is it in terms of throughput on your laptop?

On my SpacemiT K3 SBC with 32GB RAM (where models run on the eight A100 RISC-V cores with 1024 bit vectors) doing the same task I got 5, 5.8, 6.5 tok/s using gemma-4-26B-A4B-it-QAT-Q4_0.gguf, Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-Q4_K_M.gguf, Qwen3.5-35B-A3B-Q4_K_M.gguf. The corresponding dense models are more in the 2.5-3 tok/s range.

Kind of slow, but using only 14W of electricity so the Wh per task is twice as good as using my i9-13900 laptop with 4060 GPU.

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