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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

#251

Post by InsideOutSanta »

wickedsight wrote: post #214
ksec wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wis…

> what level is this compared to other Western paid version? IMHO this is a difficult question to answer. Part of the power of paid models comes from the software supporting it. With local models, you have tons of workflows that can severely influence the quality of the result. In my personal experience, the SOTA models are way more consistent and can handle more complex questions. Part of that is (probably) because…

You absolutely need to let models access the Internet if you want consistently good results. Pretty much any non-trivial task requires the model to do things like look up APIs, code examples, or existing discussions of a given topic.

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

#252

Post by sparkling »

apexalpha wrote: post #198
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.

It was for me too but the new deepseek pricing is too good to ignore for now. I honestly think that with my electricity prices running qwen 36B myself is more expensive than hitting the cache rate at deepseek.

Can you elaborate on DeepSeek (deepseek-v4-flash, i assume?). What does your typical usage pattern look like and what is your weekly/monthly spend?

I gave it a try for a few days (pi + openrouter + deepseek-v4-flash via deepinfra) and ended up paying ~$18 for rather light usage. Yes it's still cheap, yes it's fast, but i feel i would still get a better deal with a Claude subscription plan.

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

#253

Post by palata »

jiggawatts wrote: post #249
badsectoracula wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 an…

> 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!

Are you trying to say that local models are hard to use because... you're having issues handling files properly? I am not sure I get the argument.

I get the rest of the comment: local models require an investment upfront, and it is less convenient. It doesn't say that it is not cheaper, though.

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

#254

Post by badatnames »

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 CADA passes in its current state I doubt we'll be banning Chinese models any time soon. I think most people misunderstand the extent of the permanent damage caused by Trump

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

#255

Post by Zenst »

Whilst these coding models improve, they seem to cater for multiple languages, and for many, a trimmed-down LLM that supports just one language would be fantastic. This would be smaller, more able to run on the hardware people have at home, realistically (even on the CPU). Having one LLM that knows assembler, java, bain, C etc is neat, but when you only work and use one language at a time, it would be kinda neat to have those broken out into dedicated, smaller LLMs. After all Qwen3.8-Max handles over 90 programming languages - ask any programmer to name a list of computer languages and if they get over 20, they are doing well.

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

#256

Post by InsideOutSanta »

pimeys wrote: post #163
gilgoomesh wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> lack of European competitors There's Mistral. Although they've been surprisingly quiet for the last 6 months.

They are profitable and active on the enterprise local model territory. You can RL a model with them for your own purposes and I heard good things about it.

Mistral's business model works even if they start using Chinese models instead of training their own.

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

#257

Post by me551ah »

This makes me wonder if AI companies even have a MOAT in the first place.

All requests to an LLM are idempotent, for every API call you need to send it the entire conversation history so that it can process it. LLMs do not learn or remember anything, which makes it super easy for users to switch LLMs on the fly. Most popular AI frameworks, make this a one-liner change these days.

And that makes me wonder if the trillion dollar valuations for OpenAI and Claude are even justified. Cause if that is justified, then Kimi, Qwen, Deepseek etc are also valued at a trillion dollars. Or all of them are worth a lot less. One of those statements is true.

Also this makes me wonder if the next iteration of LLMs would be based on fine-tuning, where LLMs actually learn from your past behaviour so that it would grant some amount of stickiness to the product. OpenAI used to offer fine tuning runs for GPT-3.5, but they don't seem to do that anymore.

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

#258

Post by user43928 »

pama wrote: post #250
badsectoracula wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 addit…

Considering that very few orgs are going to be able to host a 3T parameter model internally, chances are most deployments would be subject to these restrictions and require a separate license from Moonshot.

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

#259

Post by maattdd »

sparkling wrote: post #252
apexalpha wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was for me too but the new deepseek pricing is too good to ignore for now. I honestly think that with my electricity prices running qwen 36B myself is more expensive than hitting the cache rate at deepseek.

Can you elaborate on DeepSeek (deepseek-v4-flash, i assume?). What does your typical usage pattern look like and what is your weekly/monthly spend? I gave it a try for a few days (pi + openrouter + deepseek-v4-flash via deepinfra) and ended up paying ~$18 for rather light usage. Yes it's still cheap, yes it's fast, but i feel i would still get a better deal with a Claude subscription plan.

DeepSeek without OpenRouter is wayyyy cheaper

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

#260

Post by sparkling »

maattdd wrote: post #259
sparkling wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate on DeepSeek (deepseek-v4-flash, i assume?). What does your typical usage pattern look like and what is your weekly/monthly spend? I gave it a try for a few days (pi + openrouter + deepseek-v4-flash via deepinfra) and ended up paying ~$18 for rather light usage. Yes it's still cheap, yes it's fast, but i feel i would still get a better deal with a Claude subscription plan.

DeepSeek without OpenRouter is wayyyy cheaper

Is it? OpenRouter shows DeepInfra being cheaper than DeepSeek directly

https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-v4-flash-20260731#pr...

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