Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

qwen.ai

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 653 posts

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

#241

Post by traceroute66 »

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!

> 35B MoE is certainly a good and fast local model. I find 27B dense to be quite a bit smarter

Isn't that just the definition of MoE vs dense ?

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

#243

Post by stanac »

markasoftware wrote: post #197
theanonymousone wrote: post #162

At $2/$6, it can be much more "approachable" than K3. Wondering what have they done differently to be able to afford this price (that K3 couldn't, apparently - most other providers offer similar prices to K3 itself).

Moonshot is printing money on k3. It likely costs the same to serve as qwen3.8. The license requires all major inference providers to sign an extra (secret) licensing agreement with moonshot that almost certainly requires them to agree to this price and pay royalties to moonshot. Watch as the k3 price plummets over the next 1-2 weeks.

If k3 is open-weight (and it's available on hugging face [1]), how could they force providers to sing an extra (secret) licensing agreement?

Edit to answer my own question:

License file [2] states:

> If the Licensee or any of its affiliates operates a Model as a Service business, and the aggregate revenue of the Licensee and its affiliates exceeds 20 million US dollars (or the equivalent in other currencies) in total over any consecutive 12 months, the Licensee must enter into a separate agreement with Moonshot AI before using the Software or its derivative works for any commercial purpose.

[1] https://huggingface.co/moonshotai/Kimi-K3

[2] https://huggingface.co/moonshotai/Kimi-K3/blob/main/LICENSE

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

#244

Post by Fordec »

rzerowan wrote: post #232
Fordec wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Theres a pretty big chance imho that europe will follow suit , or at least the segmenets that are fully aligned with the US on all things china even to their own detriment. Remeber rip and replace Huawei 5G because of national security , leading to some parts of europe having worse coverage than some tiny african markets. Best bet would be for europe to look at it like what it is an open source commodity that is usef…

If it was 2021, probably. But Trump has soured relations in the last 18 months enough that the soft power about technology isn't there like it once was assumed to be. What's he going to do if Europe doesn't step in? Jack up tariffs? Is it that day of the week already?

Open weights is more beneficial to Europe spring-boarding a catch up than defending Claude/Anthropic.

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

#245

Post by cetinsert »

bsder wrote: post #196
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…

> $200 in rent every month into the large model providers We all know that is hugely subsidized, and I guarantee that OpenAI and Anthropic are looking to enshittify that ASAP. The enterprise users, however, are not subsidized like that. They pay per token. And some developers in those companies are chewing down a lot of tokens. Self-hosting an open weight model could be a massive savings very quickly. It also gives t…

We all ASSUME that.

For all we know, inference might be dirt cheap, they might just be hiking the API prices so high for us to think subscriptions are subsidized.

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

#246

Post by zargon »

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.

> The point of local models is privacy, offline use, and maybe no guard rails.

But also, control and consistency. A local model cannot be changed out under your feet like an API model can be.

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

#247

Post by anon-3988 »

vorticalbox wrote: post #239
anon-3988 wrote: post #228

What is the best LLM that I can use right now that is optimized for everything other than coding? The last thing I want my personal agent to do is to write up code and run arbitrary commands. That is practically a legalized RCE.

that is not an model issue but a harness one, if you don't want it to have io to files or run command then simple don't give it access to the tools.

Yes, I don't. I have my own harness where the agent is only able to do a set of predefined things and none of them involves the internet. However, I imagine the model could be a lot smaller if it does not have the baggage of coding and programming in general.

I mostly just need it to mostly be a very advanced NLP model that is able to figure the set of tools that it needs to call with what argument. Then it will just follow a predefined decision tree.

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

#248

Post by westpfelia »

nozzlegear wrote: post #27
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.

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.

I'm a big ole noob when it comes to local AI. What are you using for a harness? Or platform to interact with it?

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

#249

Post by jiggawatts »

badsectoracula wrote: post #222
websap wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

A local model needs 0 investment and 0 commitment, takes literal minutes to get started (especially if you have someone who is into that stuff showing you the ropes) and if you end up disliking the experience of using AI you can just `rm -fr` it and forget the whole thing existed.

This is the diametric opposite of the rent-vs-buy scenario that this entails.

Local: You need to invest $thousands into GPU and/or very-high-end CPU+Memory hardware.

Vendor: You can use any existing device, even a phone or tablet. A very low-end laptop is fine.

> takes literal minutes to get started

Local: Typical scenario is hours just to download the software, the model weights, and then faffing around with CUDA and matching your GPU drivers.

Vendor: Free-tier available instantly on a web URL. Even local agents have free tiers from multiple vendors. Install is a single command and/or download and "next,next,next,finish" wizard that takes ~1 minute.

> you can just `rm -fr` it and forget the whole thing existed.

I'm still cleaning up multi-GB model weights floating around in hidden subdirectories under my user profile from months ago when I was experimenting with local models!

Meanwhile I simply... stopped using Gemini. That was the entire process: I no longer actively use it. They stopped billing me for my token usage, because it is now zero. That's... it.

You have it totally backwards.

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

#250

Post by pama »

badsectoracula wrote: post #231
throwaw12 wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Qwen3.8-Max is the first in Qwen-Max series to be open-weight as well. Kimi K3, GLM 5.2 and now Qwen3.8-Max - open weight models. DeepSeek V4 Flash outperforming Gemini 3.1 pro, probably DeepSeek V4 Pro update is also coming soon Chinese labs are cooking very hard. US closed weight labs are probably hard time to resist not calling Washington DC for more AI regulations

Kimi K3 is more like "weights available" in that you can download and use them but it is under a custom license that has a bunch of limitations where you have to pay Moonshot for doing some stuff. GLM 5.2 on the other hand is plain old MIT. Not sure how Qwen3.8-Max is going to be licensed, hopefully it'll be Apache like the smaller ones.

You can do whatever you want with the model within your own organization. If you use it commercially—either as a model-as-a-service business or in a very large-scale product—you should check the additional license terms, which go beyond MIT. My interpretation is that Moonshot cares about the exact inference behavior and accurate representation of their model or derivatives, and perhaps also about capturing some additional value despite their own GPU limitations, so the extra license terms focus on those large-scale commercial deployments.
Post reply on HN