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

441–450 of 652 posts

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

#441

Post by satvikpendem »

gizmodo59 wrote: post #340
satvikpendem wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google figured this out with their paper from 2023, We have no moat and neither does OpenAI . The moat now is the harness and being able to recursively self improve from RLHF, a great example is how Grok used to be pretty bad but since SpaceX bought Cursor, they used that data to train Grok 4.5 which is now very competent at coding and even exceeds frontier models in certain benchmarks. https://www.semianalysis.com/p…

Moat is not the harness. Harness itself is temporary until the models get better and slowly the code in harness will go down. Note that the biggest GPU providers in the world are the hyper scalers and even they couldn’t allocate more if you pay for it. Because the rich companies and well funded ones are gobbling them up to the point where if tomorrow a 5T model that smokes every other model in the world is released y…

I meant that companies like Anthropic are locking in users with proprietary formats in their harness where it's hard to leave.

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

#442

Post by clusterhacks »

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…

Running locally for me is mainly about learning, maintaining control+privacy, and helping shift my coding+design process to leverage LLMs. I guess if you made me boil it down to a single word to justify the cost I would just say: tuition.

Sounds like we have similar boxes - mine has a 10 core CPU, 64 GB of ram, and a 2070 Super. My motherboard had two unused PCIe3x8 slots and doesn't support Blackwell GPUs. I bought a couple of brand new Ada generation RTX 2000s with 16GB of memory for under $1400 to get to 40 GB of VRAM. That will easily run Qwen3.6-27b at a 6-bit quantization and 80,000 token context size. It isn't fast (19-21 t/s), but using pi-coding-agent is fine.

Now, my instinct is that I am giving up SOTA performance on agentic coding with this setup and LLM. But the gap between my setup and SOTA commercial models is small enough that it doesn't matter to me.

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

#443

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

breakingcups wrote: post #293
stanac wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Can weights be copyrightable?

Licenses are not copyright law, they are contract law. Copyright is automatic and does not require any terms, as long as the work is covered by copyright. Contract law can then override the innate copyright rights (for example to permit people to use your copyrighted works).

If you create something that isn't copyright-able, you can still create a contract which people must agree to in order to use your work. The enforcement/validity of that contract then depends on making sure the user knew about the contract and agreed to it. The way they did that here (just publishing a LICENSE file) could be interpreted as a judge as no confirmation of agreement of contract - depending on if they find a "reasonable" user would have known to look for the file.

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

#444

Post by pettijohn »

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

Strix Halo, 128GB RAM. I got a refurbished Corsair AI Workstation for a smoking price ($2100) about two months ago. Lucky timing that it was in stock.

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

#445

Post by jerf »

msdz wrote: post #328
jcoder wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All requests to an LLM are idempotent, for every API call you need to send it the entire conversation history A more appropriate term is “stateless”. LLM responses are certainly not idempotent, as they are not even deterministic.

Which is why big labs have been working hard on making their harness not be stateless any longer: https://earendil.com/posts/session-portability/ “Just take the session thread to another provider” might not be feasible anymore soon-ish.

While that particular API might be nice, and people and companies should probably push back against the obfuscation, in the end it doesn't really matter. When I hand off between different models I already have the first model prepare a markdown file for the second rather than just importing the entire original thread wholesale, because that's expensive anyhow, and also rather unfocused. They can't get their models to stop generating that sort of checkpoint because that's a fundamental operation necessary for all the harnesses to work anyhow.

The fundamental technology of LLMs and arguably AI in general strongly cuts against that sort of lockin. Handoff is a fundamental capability. There's no option to encrypt the docs or write it in some dialect only one model understands because humans need to understand it to, which stops that whole line dead in its tracks for at least the forseeable future. An AI can already today pick up such pieces, how much more easily will they do it tomorrow?

If they want to lock me in, they're going to need to provide a feature that I need so badly I can't switch and nobody else has. It is hard to see what that would be, other than being a generally better model.

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

#446

Post by jackie293746 »

cowboy_henk wrote: post #194
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.

In the 1800s most families only had a single provider, so this percentage may have been higher back then than it is now.

[dead]

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

#448

Post by ncphillips »

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.

What kind of machine do you have running that? My attempts at local have always resulted in a very hot lap

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

#449

Post by [deleted] »

ucha wrote: post #264
Zenst wrote: post #255

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 h…

That's not how LLMs work. If you're talking about number of parameters, you wouldn't be able to reduce the size much by "removing" support for other languages.

[deleted]

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

#450

Post by jedbrooke »

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.

the bonsai 27B 1bit quant version of Qwen3.6 27B is even more nuts, model fits in 4GB, and with 100k of content model+kv cache fits in 8GB. I’ve been running it locally on my mac mini 16GB. it gets around 4-6 tok/s, so not quite real-time ready, but good enough to let it run on task async for 20 min and come back. The 1bit model struggles a bit with multi-turn conversations though (e.g. when switching from plan to act mode it will still keep trying to make a plan) but that’s easy enough to reformat prompts into multiple one shot sessions of smaller work.
Post reply on HN