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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

#171

Post by suslik »

aianus wrote: post #113
jofzar wrote: post #4

Lmao I love their video with the idea that people will be able to do their hobbies while ai does their job. Surely Alibaba is leading by example here by reducing work hours per week while keeping pay the same right? Right?

The percentage of the population that needs to work will continue to go down because of aging and automation although you might not see it as a reduction of hours for a given individual employed person. Already 38% of Americans aged 16 or older do not work and are not looking for work and yet are not dying from hunger or exposure. This would have seemed like a utopian dream to someone from the 1800s.

But how is that possible? How can one survive without income barring homelessness, begging, prostitution, and other not so utopian options?

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

#172

Post by Der_Einzige »

aurareturn wrote: post #84
aliljet wrote: post #79

I'm trying and failing to find value running a potential Qwen 3.8 27b dense model on a 16 core, 128 GB of ram, 2080ti box. Yes, the GPU yells for help, but the problem is that no math works to upgrade this machine even when pouring $200 in rent every month into the large model providers... How are you all justifying economical use of these local models right now? What's the cost efficient way to do this and do better…

You will simply not get more value out of running a local model vs paying for a subscription/API from the cloud in 2026. There is no math that will make local models come out ahead in $/intelligence/token.* The point of local models is privacy, offline use, and maybe no guard rails. * Not talking about enterprises that buy DGX racks and host Chinese models for internal use.

There is for $/creativity/token. LLM sampling settings are poorly supported even in open source serverless providers but are the single best lever you have for getting better outputs in regards to creativity (and quality for long context or highly quantized models).

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

#173

Post by colordrops »

tommica wrote: post #104
nozzlegear wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't mention it above, but Laguna S is my other favorite model. I use Qwen a lot more, it's smaller and faster, but I like to switch to Laguna when I feel like I need a "heavy hitter" for certain huge or complex tasks.

What on earth hardwares do you guys have to be able to run 100gb models locally?! That's crazy! I'm here struggling to even get 27b models to run in somewhat usable way

MoE models can use system memory along with a GPU.

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

#174

Post by konart »

HDBaseT wrote: post #143
aianus wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The percentage of the population that needs to work will continue to go down because of aging and automation although you might not see it as a reduction of hours for a given individual employed person. Already 38% of Americans aged 16 or older do not work and are not looking for work and yet are not dying from hunger or exposure. This would have seemed like a utopian dream to someone from the 1800s.

Source? Being 16, 17 and 18 and not working is expected, given they are still at school. A good percentage of people aged 18 to 24 are studying full time. This stat seems a bit misleading and doesn't support the "you can live and not work argument". How many of those people are retired? How many of those are under 18? How many of those simply cannot work? How many of those live at home or are on food stamp?

>is expected

... these days. 100 years ago you'd have a job at 12 in many cases, 14-16 if you were more lucky.

I'm not even talking about peasants from previous centuries.

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

#175

Post by fauigerzigerk »

akmarinov wrote: post #156
CamperBob2 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Level 1: Anyone using unauthorized model weights in their business is prohibited from doing business with the government... Level 2: ... or with anyone who does. Level 3: Anyone caught with unauthorized model weights is subject to the same prosecution they could expect if they had been caught with CSAM.

Cool - how are they going to detect/police that?

Whistleblowers. Personal use would still be possible of course.

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

#176

Post by ksec »

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.

For those of us who don't have the time to follow closely, Qwen3.6-27B being Open Source and Open Weight, what level is this compared to other Western paid version?

Just so that we know what 3.8 would be like.

I currently have about 150 Tabs of Antirez posting on AI and running local model I haven't had the time to read. And there are probably some prerequisite reading or other research in between as well. I just wish there are some very high level overview and news coverage on all these.

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

#177

Post by dinkumthinkum »

aianus wrote: post #113
jofzar wrote: post #4

Lmao I love their video with the idea that people will be able to do their hobbies while ai does their job. Surely Alibaba is leading by example here by reducing work hours per week while keeping pay the same right? Right?

The percentage of the population that needs to work will continue to go down because of aging and automation although you might not see it as a reduction of hours for a given individual employed person. Already 38% of Americans aged 16 or older do not work and are not looking for work and yet are not dying from hunger or exposure. This would have seemed like a utopian dream to someone from the 1800s.

Maybe you should ask AI to review your statistics and reasoning. A large amount of 16-22 year old kids are in school. And retirees 80+ are retired. I don't see how any of this is relevant to the idea of what would happen to the economy if there is an employment collapse. I don't know that this would also seem like a utopian dream to someone in the 1800s; I'm not sure what that means. I think someone from the 1800s would be surprised by a great many things and that statistic would probably be low on their list.

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

#178

Post by dalemhurley »

perbu wrote: post #147
docheinestages wrote: post #124

It was a matter of time for China to catch up with the US. In terms of infrastructure, manufacturing, and engineering workforce, China has the upperhand and I foresee them becoming the SOTA leaders. Maybe if the US wasn't so busy gatekeeping and keeping things proprietary, they would've had more trust from the open source community.

First and foremost, China isn't energy-limited like the US is. A modern grid, lost of cheap power coming online every day. The worlds most advance ultra-high voltage transport links are tying the deserts in the west to the cities in the south. It probably sucks for you if the proposed powerline goes through your house, but the need of the many come first. Having cheap and plentiful power is a huge market advantage. I…

There is economic benefits of the cost per a lumen continuously coming down.

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

#179

Post by aurareturn »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #172
aurareturn wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You will simply not get more value out of running a local model vs paying for a subscription/API from the cloud in 2026. There is no math that will make local models come out ahead in $/intelligence/token.* The point of local models is privacy, offline use, and maybe no guard rails. * Not talking about enterprises that buy DGX racks and host Chinese models for internal use.

There is for $/creativity/token. LLM sampling settings are poorly supported even in open source serverless providers but are the single best lever you have for getting better outputs in regards to creativity (and quality for long context or highly quantized models).

I'm pretty sure you can adjust the creativity for many Chinese model inference providers.

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

#180

Post by magicalwh »

icelancer wrote: post #26
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.

This is what I've been waiting for. We are still using fine-tuned deployments of Qwen3.6-27B with a lot of success but could use a bump in intelligence. Here's hoping.

How and where do you finetune it?
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