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

qwen.ai

271–280 of 652 posts

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

#271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good luck doing that in China?

>Good luck doing that in China. Crazy how all the 5 eyes nations banned Huawei within like 18 months of each other.

For certain specific uses. As a consumer I can still buy Huawei phones. As a business I can still buy Huawei routers, if I feel so inclined.

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

#272
post #94

is it the right time to perhaps switch to QwenCode ? i might end up cancelling claude, anybody else thinking of the same ?

Already done it. But switched to Codex instead. See you on the other side buddy.

I'm oh so seriously tempted to switch at least for a month or two.

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

#273
Waiting for Qwen3.8-27B :)

Their base models and architecture has quickly become the go-to for local inference and fine-tuning, even when they introduced some tricky things like GDN, so many people use it, that it was matter of days/weeks until lots of OSS frameworks adopted it.

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

#274

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.

Does this desideratum make any sense? The whole point is that you write to it in English or Urdu, and it writes the specified code. If you cut off everything but the code writing, you cut off everything.

If you're literally using it as code autocomplete that's not functionally true. But it's still neither well specified nor a good idea.

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

#276

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.

> trust from the open source community

volunteers in the open source community use whatever is easiest and cheap.

open weights is not open source. there is no "trust".

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

#277

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

Yeah, here I am sitting deeply deeply deeply regretting not buying couple CMP 170HX at $200 or $350, knowing I could just flip them ethically at purchase price if nothing came of it... I could have just casually built a 128GB dual A100 local AI monster

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

#278

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…

Huh what? Qwen3.5-35B-A3B runs just fine with maximum context, on an RTX SUPER 12 GB, with offloading of some expert layers to DDR4-3200.

Same story on an RTX 4060 Ti 16 GB. MTP is a serious boost to tg.

Downloading the model is a simple hf command that HuggingFace's web UI even gives you.

llama.cpp is trivial to use, and so is llama-swap, if you want to use other models too.

If you don't know what arguments to run it with, you download ggrun and use that.

Local LLMs are incredibly capable and don't need expensive hardware. A $500 GPU will do. Or even cheaper.

This is all trivial.

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

#280

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.

On what hardware do you run the model locally, if so?
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