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

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

#181

Post by gilgoomesh »

AureliusMA wrote: post #98
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.

Points are starting to be made in favor of value, to the contrary of what you are affirming. Specifically because the new open weights models lower the TCO of hardware in an environment where new open weights were previously thought to be a thing of the past.

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

#182

Post by hobofan »

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…

The US also isn't energy-limited. They'll just price out all humans living there from buying any electricity.

EDIT: This was obviously meant to be facetious with the intent to highlight the negative effects on the general population that datacenter buildout has in the US.

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

#183

Post by inhumantsar »

jjcm wrote: post #170

The visual web development / perceptionbench scores are very promising for image->html flows. Here are some test results. Original designs: https://image.non.io/257dc9cb-9e6b-4e00-8f12-23ea5e073649.we... These are fairly rich, pattern-heavy, nuanced designs. I've asked each to create it as a SPA where the map flows behind it. Opus 5 results: https://html.non.io/opusAcmeBooks Qwen 3.8 max results: https://html.non.io/…

I've had nothing but trouble with Qwen on opencode. GLM too. I know a few people who use them on Ollama could without issue though, so I don't think it's a model issue.

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

#184

Post by usernomdeguerre »

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?

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

#185

Post by overfeed »

hippycruncher22 wrote: post #129
XCSme wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they trained it well, and can do computer use, it will be a new era. Companies can keep PCs, put Qwen 3.8 27b on it and get rid of the employees, lol...

Yes let’s get rid of employees so no one is employed but somehow they can afford to buy my stuff

It's the natural outcome of next-quarter short-termism. The board and C-suite will be fine (monetarily).

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

#186

Post by twelve40 »

lelanthran wrote: post #125
twelve40 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

coding on a laptop is only one use case you can't create a new drug by running a model on a laptop. You can't serve a customer support bot running on a laptop. You can't generate video in bulk for many users on a laptop. So there is still a case for paying others for inference. Does it justify the valuations? No idea, but some major use cases are still there. That's why they are rushing to implement, OpenAI creating…

Surely all those use cases can be done right now without a closed model? I think GP was asking specifically about the use case for closed models.

yes, but at that point even open weight models are not free. Can someone set up the best open-weight model for free and charge pretty much just for GPU usage+operations+margin for inference? yes. But they would have to keep up with how good the private models are. The bet is private models would sell in a similar way at a premium and invest in staying ahead. Is this bet going to work? no idea, don't shoot the messenger.

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

#187

Post by zmmmmm »

Fordec wrote: post #119
storus wrote: post #67

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.

Even if the US does ban it, Europe due to its lack of European competitors, has no current similar protectionist incentives. Even if there is regulatory capture in the US, the rest of the world isn't going to follow suit until the current market leaders outright are replaced with other competitors that Europe would want to favor. The genie is out of the bottle in the West already.

well, the EU just brought down the regulatory hammer which complicates things a bit. we will have to see if it operates as a proxy ban on open models depending on how they go about enforcing all the safety, bias, transparency and data provenance requirements.

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

#188

Post by lovasoa »

twelve40 wrote: post #91
dmix wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sam drank the "superintelligence" kool aid early on and said 30-40% of jobs could be impacted by AI, but recently admitted he was wrong > “My scorecard, at the highest level, would be we’ve been roughly right on technological predictions and pretty wrong on the social and economic implications” https://www.cxtoday.com/ai-automation-in-cx/sam-altman-softe... I agree re: Dario quietly pushing for government control. He…

but this crap may take forever to play out even if the outcome is well-known. Self-driving is "here", it's obvious that once it's cheap enough having a human behind a car wheel or a freight truck wheel is an absurd waste of human life (kinda like digging canals with bare hands instead of an excavator), yet truckers and uber drivers are still employed. But everyone knows the writing is on the wall for them.

the writing has been on the wall for fifteen years, and yet the number of professional drivers has only increased since then...

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

#189

Post by dsign »

gr_norm wrote: post #66
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 in…

> What am I missing?

Their marketing department :-) . I'm only half-joking; those guys are hard at work finding the best product-market fit for ChatGPT/Claude. "Product market fit" means "strongest revenue", which is not necessarily going to bring the best tool for you or me, but the one that can either get more consumers to shell off money, or more enterprises to cough money for licenses, and in both cases those consumer basis will be narrowed down to what legal and geopolitical circumstances allow OpenAI and Anthropic (and this is why they want to ban the competition!). It also means dark patterns and enshitification, of which I'm already seeing some both in the Codex interface (it was just renamed "ChatGPT"!!!) and in Claude Code (which also is just "Claude" now and can't '@' properly any longer). So in the medium run most people will be better off running an open source harness that can use any model.

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

#190

Post by choppaface »

Art9681 wrote: post #19
choppaface wrote: post #11

“self-evolves through feedback loops” Does this mean they distilled Claude? Sounds like what Claude Code will often do.

Of course they did.

I mean sure but I’m curious to what extent and why it’s so obvious to some. I haven’t seen this sort of language in a marketing post before.
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