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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

#531

Post by blitzar »

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.

> they need to see/learn by themselves

The cleanup pay is mighty generous as well.

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

#532

Post by jcoder »

jcoder wrote: post #305
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…

> 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.

I appreciate the replies on the determinism point and I’ve learned some new things here. In any case I probably should not have tagged that on, as my main point was to share that the sort of property that parent is talking about (whether true for all LLMs/providers/harnesses or not) is statelessness, not idempotency.

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

#533

Post by vorticalbox »

satvikpendem wrote: post #334
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…

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…

Is it RLHF if there is no human feedback?

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

#534

Post by priyanmuthu »

aka-rider wrote: post #485
beltsazar wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I’ve run 3.6-27B and 3.6-35B on 32GB locally for a lot of bulk non-code tasks. Do you mind sharing your use cases?

Not OP, but driving knowledge bases is the poster child use case for me https://github.com/aka-rider/llm-wiki I started with Karpathy's LLM wiki, and did everything he said not to do - downgraded the model to mere tool usage and summarization, and it works great. I am a data hoarder, and finally I can just dump all the content I remotely like, and get something interesting to browse for the price of electricity. Agen…

Love the workflow. Is there an existing way to do this inside Obsidian -- where I have all my knowledge?

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

#535

Post by [deleted] »

andriy_koval wrote: post #524
user43928 wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

probably will be few clicks in dashboard of your org's cloud provider.

[deleted]

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

#536

Post by mtrovo »

varispeed wrote: post #360
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…

From my experience these open source models are nowhere near the performance offered by Fable/Opus/GPT-5.6. Whenever I tried Qwen, Kimi, Deepseek, the results were much worse and it just took much more time to get something usable. When you consider that, the frontier offerings are still much cheaper.

That might be true right now, but how long until you have to move the goalposts? In my experience with DeepSeek and Kimi, they're as capable as the frontier was four months ago, which already solves a big chunk of the coding tasks that I'm interested in.

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

#537

Post by msdz »

jerf wrote: post #445
msdz wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Soooo… when can we expect an encrypted handoff.md to fully prevent session portability, then?

(Only half-/s)

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

#538

Post by DANmode »

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…

I thought this comment was going to be about leveraging agents in ways your existing clientele demographic cannot or will not (yet|ever),

but then you totally jumped the shark!

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

#539

Post by Aldipower »

> How Qwen Cloud handles your data during inference? > Qwen Cloud does not use your API inputs or outputs to train or improve models. > Learn more about how your data is handled during the inference process from Zero data retention.

If this is true, this is a big deal for me, but unfortunately I cannot find anything in their legal agreements, so this marketing sentence is worthless.

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

#540

Post by delusional »

mbrumlow wrote: post #523
gtirloni wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

What does the benchmark even mean when people are using AI to make real world things that solve real world problems? I see people, and my self making amazing things with AI and fixing old projects and having real world impact at the fraction of the cost it would take me to hire people, or hours spent on my own coding. I have built tools and systems with AI that have allowed me to build windows drivers, android apps,…

What amazing windows drivers have you sold?
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