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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

#501

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

I like that Alibaba are emphasizing more challenging real-world "coding" tasks as well as just benchmarks.

The "Reproduce a research paper — then improve it" seems particularly impressive as well as actually useful - perhaps as close as we're going to get to "recursive self-improvement" given that these are data-driven not code-driven models.

I'm not sure how much real world use of AI is 100% hands off agentic coding, but I guess for objective evaluation purposes it needs to be something without a human in the loop.

It'd be interesting to see a comparison of each company's best models on a suite of real-world challenging tasks like this, but I guess difficult since each group of tasks would need to be one-time-use only to prevent subsequent benchmaxxing which makes comparisons useless.

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

#502

Post by ricardobeat »

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.

Evaporative cooling is a matter of convenience and cost, not a necessity. Other cooling technologies can be used. Intel has already proven a closed-loop system can work just as well.

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

#503

Post by codemk8 »

akmarinov wrote: post #402
victorbjorklund wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same way they detect if you do business with Russia, North Korea, Iran. They don’t detect 100% of the cases but the punishment are severe enough to deter most companies.

How exactly though? I have my 4 RTX 6000 pumping out Deepseek code for my website - how are they going to tell i've used Chinese models?

This post exactly ;-)

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

#504

Post by jychang »

gtirloni wrote: post #490
ilaksh wrote: post #471

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 as…

> 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. If you search for LLM benchmarks focused on real-world tasks, you'll quickly learn this ain't the case. No point in telling business owners about that though, they need to see/learn by themselves.

If only LLM benchmarks could benchmark it in the first day!

Still no Artificial Analysis benchmark yet. Or benchmark for Laguna S 2.1 or Meituan models or lots of other models.

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

#505

Post by capnjngl »

jjcm wrote: post #218
jjcm wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Update: Tried using Qwen Desktop. It told me it succeeded, and linked me to the folder it created it in. That folder didn't exist, I asked Qwen where the files were, and it attempted to create them again. Stopped it, and asked what happened to the original files. Qwen Desktop apparently doesn't have access to the local file system, but continued merrily along without warning about that. https://image.non.io/07a153cd-…

Also tried Qwen Code. Tried it with a coding plan and it 401'd. Tried it with an api key I loaded up with pay-as-you-go credits and it 401'd. It did a self update and it worked for a single request (me just saying hi). Pasted in the prompt to build the page and it 401'd.

AGI confirmed

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

#506

Post by dofm »

trollbridge wrote: post #149
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.

Qwen-3.6-35B-A3B was our "gateway drug" into switching our organisation to agent/harness-first coding. Particularly, I had one team member who was extremely sceptical of AIs/LLMs/harnesses and refused to use them. One day he said "Well, I have an RTX 5090 doing nothing... should I try to get something up on it?" and a few minutes later he had 3.6-35B loaded up, running OpenCode. It continues to be a workhorse to this…

That is exactly what got me past just enough of my cynicism to get started. I am still cynical but now I have meaningful knowledge.

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

#507

Post by CyberDildonics »

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote: post #121
nozzlegear wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haha I'm on an Mac Studio with an M1 Ultra, 64gb ram. I bought it when it first came out, it just happens to be good for local LLMs. I have to use a smaller quant of Laguna S though (I think 4-bit? Not at my machine to check), as 8-bit and full size definitely don't fit in the 64gb I have.

Yeah, a good rule of thumb is that the weights take up ~100% of the size of the model, so 100B bytes (8-bit quant) would be, well, 100GB and a 4-bit quant would be half that.

I don't know if that's, well, a rule of thumb, it might be, well, straight multiplication.

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

#508

Post by nozzlegear »

bckr wrote: post #150
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 are the specs of your laptop and what tokens per second do you get?

It's just a Macbook Air with the base M4 and 16gb ram, but I'm hosting the models on a Mac Studio with M1 Ultra and 64gb ram that I had purchased when it came out. I get about 45-55 tokens per second with this setup. I think I could get more if I spent some time fiddling with the parameters, but I don't really know what I'm doing there so I've just left most of it on oMLX's defaults.

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

#509

Post by eikenberry »

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.

And this is why you should not use the model provider's harness. It is to tight of a coupling of services that's only business purpose is lock-in.

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

#510

Post by lenerdenator »

ListeningPie wrote: post #361
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…

And yet investment is continuing. What are they counting on?

One possibility is that they're counting on another bailout package like the banks and others got in 2008.

The bets are absolutely huge and have been spread throughout the financial system via securitization. If the number does not continue to go up, a lot of people are going to find themselves backing their numbers with money that simply isn't there anymore. Therefore, the number will continue to go up and we (meaning American taxpayers) will back whatever it takes for that to happen.

Now, were the bets stupid to begin with? Of course. Who wants a machine that potentially unemploys major percentages of the population? No one. But the bets were made regardless, and then more bets were made on the hypothetical returns of the first round of bets, and so on and so on.

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