Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you please tell which Gemma 4 variant managed to correctly reason through your private benchmarks? Was is Gemma 4 31B? What quantizations and context lengths did you use for Gemma 4 and Qwen 3.8 27B? I am asking because I can't even load Gemma 4 31B on my GPU with any reasonable quantization (even with small context), while I can run Qwen 3.8 27B with large context and good quantization...
Then you might be missing SWA. Gemma models are extremely memory hungry without
Qwen 3.8 27B
701–710 of 848 posts
Re: Qwen 3.8 27B
#702Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Qwen 3.8 27B is only the second local model after Gemma 4 that managed to correctly reason through one of my private benchmarks. I don't expect you to blab publicly about your private benchmark, but what sorts of reasoning does it require?
Well, I will say: #1: it does not require deep world knowledge, because that's not what local models are for. #2: it directly attacks drive-by understanding, overly linear processing training, poor attention mechanisms, poor reasoning patterns or lazy assumptions that ignore very easy low hanging fruit. #3: it requires solid instruction following in the face of errors. a lot of models will run into errors and then fa…
Re: Qwen 3.8 27B
#703Re: Qwen 3.8 27B
#704SWE: model is strong for its size. It one-shotted the Web app, had no bug. The Rust rewrite only had one bug (reordering didn't work immediately - fixed in one prompt). Committed locally then pushed to my GitHub (https://github.com/DexterLagan/RusTODO). Can't complain. If it can do that reliably, I can use it to make whatever I need.
General knowledge: I usually ask 2 questions many small models get wrong: summarize Operation Trojan Horse by John Keel, give publication year. Summarize the Ariel school incident of 1994. Qwen3.8 got the first question right, along correct publication year, gave glorious detail on Keel's theory, but got the second wrong. It thought that school was located in the USA. Ah well.
Performance on an admittedly overpowered laptop: 15 tokens/s in power save mode on this MacBook M5 Max 48GB, and 30 in performance mode. Perfectly usable for local coding through OpenCode.
Verdict: very nice local and free backup to my usual GPT/Claude/DeepSeek for code. Good for Web searches via Brave search tool calls. What more do you want from a small local model?
Re: Qwen 3.8 27B
#705Re: Qwen 3.8 27B
#706Earlier quoted context omitted.
Use 3.6 27b as a daily driver for months with charmbracelet crush. Gemma 26b-A3b is not even remotely comparable in terms of coding for me. YMMV depending on how you work, what harness you use, etc I suppose.
really? crush.... it's trash harness compared to pi. I didn't realise there are people out there unironically using crush
Re: Qwen 3.8 27B
#707Re: Qwen 3.8 27B
#708Tested the model briefly with my usual eval: a couple of questions on general knowledge most small models often get wrong, then write a fully-featured todo list app in JS, then rewrite the same app in Rust with Tauri. Granted, most models are well trained on basic todo apps, but it gives me an idea of the basic SWE capabilities I can build on. As far as I'm concerned, if it can successfully setup a local git repo, wr…
Re: Qwen 3.8 27B
#709For FP8, on a single Nvidia 6000 RTX 48GB, i get 13 tokens/sec on a single GPU and 46 tokens/sec batched.
Re: Qwen 3.8 27B
#710Absolutely the best pelican I've seen from a model that runs on my laptop: https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer#url=ht... Bicycle is the right shape. Pelican beak is excellent. Nice background. Most importantly, the pelican has one leg on each side of the bicycle - that's very rare. (No chain on this bicycle though - in the reasoning trace it says "already chainstay... skip chain detail; maybe a smal…
Chains exist. Red scarf is proactively added. ("Maybe a scarf blowing in the wind for charm!) No hands/wings, though.
Generated 30.2k tokens in total and took 52 mins on M5 Pro in low power mode (it will possibly take less than half of that in auto energy mode).