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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

#471

Post by ilaksh »

As someone who is searching for a new programming contract right now, reading all of the incredible abilities here is pretty intimidating. Especially since I get almost all of my projects from Upwork which is an outsourcing site.

I believe I am competing directly with these frontier models in some circumstances. Like there are a ton of programmers who previously would be outsourcing work to that site, but now they assign that same work to AI agents.

Ever since November 2022 when ChatGPT blew up, I have been focusing on agents in order to try to get ahead of the curve. But I haven't managed to get an agent business off the ground and have been doing poorly paid agentic projects from that site instead.

But now everyone is building agents, and this crazy list of accomplishments makes it look like we are close to the point where the agents are building agents.

In fact the next time I get an Upwork contract for another agent, I actually should run it through my agent and see how far it can get. What I'm seeing a lot of now is requests to automate as much of a business as possible.

Anyway the point is these models are just about capable of doing the entire job of analyzing a small business and building out all the agents and iterating on them with the business owner.

That's actually what I should build is a SaaS that does that. Which I would if I wasn't basically desperate to get another contract this week.

And I know Upwork is bad but I have not had much success with other options on short notice.

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

#472

Post by aiagenta2z »

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.

Yeah, Qwen3.8-Max is the new Flagship model for coding and harness system and many other benchmarks are reaching equal performance as Claude and other close models. That's gonna drop the price of LLM in agent landscape a lot.

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

#473

Post by ktosobcy »

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.

Yeah, but the world is not limited to the US so who cares…

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

#474

Post by ktosobcy »

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…

Yeah… but last 5 years happened and UE is now in the overdrive to decouple from Usania :D

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

#475

Post by notnullorvoid »

me551ah wrote: post #257

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 trill…

> that makes me wonder if the trillion dollar valuations for OpenAI and Claude are even justified.

They aren't, not even if we forget about the capable Chinese models.

I suspect Anthropic will implode soon when employees are unable to get the cash-out that they expected. Having so much compensation locked up in company stock is risky on a good day.

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

#476

Post by nextblock »

I have a 5080 Super RTX but its still not enough to run these big models. I use Gemma 4 right now on a Debian Linux with no GUI that I access remotely. Its works pretty well, but still not as good as any of the big models like Opus 5... Can't wait to be able to buy a personal home server that can run much bigger models. I heard some companies have started building AI PCs only used to have a personal AI model at home, have any of you tried one yet?

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

#477

Post by nickthegreek »

bibstha wrote: post #460
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.

What do you use to pair it with web search?

I use searxng.

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

#478

Post by nozzlegear »

ncphillips wrote: post #448
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.

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

I host the models on my Mac Studio, an M1 Ultra with 64gb ram (I bought it when it came out, just happens to be good at LLMs). So when I work on my laptop, I have my oh-my-pi setup configured to use the models on my Mac over my local "bonjour" network or whatever Apple calls it. That way I have a nice cool lap, while using models that my M4 MacBook Air with its 16gb ram couldn't possibly run.

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

#479

Post by vinaigrette »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #312
victorbjorklund wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is stopping them from just building their data centers in the west where they have energy surplus? Not like you need to locate a data center inside a city.

Water. The west is really dry. We could throw in data lines as well but it’s really bottlenecked by water. Actually the only place in China with water in abundance is southeast China. Also they really don’t have the chips to supply those data centers, and the government isn’t so crazy to go that aggressive on AI, they have lots of other priorities as well.

I wonder if submerged system with coolant could mitigate this ?

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

#480

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #47

> In this case, Qwen3.8-Max was asked to create the oh-my-cli project from scratch and, over a 10+ day long-horizon autonomous coding run, build a self-evolving harness. They don't explain how successful that went but it's a bit hilarious seen that an Anthropic dev explained that it's been 15 days Claude was hard at work --with nothing to show yet-- trying to rewrite itself in another language. "You rewrite Claude Co…

Where did you read that Anthropic are experimenting with rewriting Claude Code?
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