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Qwen3.5 122B and 35B models offer Sonnet 4.5 performance on local computers

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Re: Qwen3.5 122B and 35B models offer Sonnet 4.5 performance on local computers

#191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hardware difference explains runtime performance differences, not task performance. Speculation is that the frontier models are all below 200B parameters but a 2x size difference wouldn’t fully explain task performance differences

> The hardware difference explains runtime performance differences, not task performance. Yes it does.

Care to elaborate?

Re: Qwen3.5 122B and 35B models offer Sonnet 4.5 performance on local computers

#192

If you're new to this: All of the open source models are playing benchmark optimization games. Every new open weight model comes with promises of being as good as something SOTA from a few months ago then they always disappoint in actual use. I've been playing with Qwen3-Coder-Next and the Qwen3.5 models since they were each released. They are impressive, but they are not performing at Sonnet 4.5 level in my experien…

All models are doing that. Not only the open source ones. I bet the cloud ones are doing it a lot more because they can also affect the runtime side which the open source ones can't.

I wouldn't mind them benchmaxing my queries.

Re: Qwen3.5 122B and 35B models offer Sonnet 4.5 performance on local computers

#193
post #99

Can it do FizzBuzz in Brainfuck? Thus far all local models have tripped over their feet or looped out.

122B-A10B-UD-Q4-K-XL generated https://pastebin.com/j3ddfNtS -- but I can't get it to do anything in a couple of online interpreters. Guessing it wasn't trained on a lot of Brainfuck code.

Edit: it looks like the flagship models work by writing a C or Python program to do the bookkeeping. I don't have Qwen set up to use tools, and even Opus 4.6 shits the bed when told to do it without tools [1], so not too surprising that it didn't work.

1: https://claude.ai/share/1f5289ae-decd-4dfa-98fd-0d34346008c6 -- I interrupted it and told it not to use a C/Python program or any other tools to generate the Brainfuck code, and it gave me an error message after about 10 minutes that wasn't logged to the chat.

Re: Qwen3.5 122B and 35B models offer Sonnet 4.5 performance on local computers

#194

If you're new to this: All of the open source models are playing benchmark optimization games. Every new open weight model comes with promises of being as good as something SOTA from a few months ago then they always disappoint in actual use. I've been playing with Qwen3-Coder-Next and the Qwen3.5 models since they were each released. They are impressive, but they are not performing at Sonnet 4.5 level in my experien…

Yes and no. "Last-gen" (like, from 6 months ago) frontier models do still tend to outperform the best open source models. But some models, especially GLM-5, really have captured whatever circuitry drives pattern matching in the models they were trained off of.

I like this benchmark that competes models against one another in competitive environments, which seems like it can't really be gamed: https://gertlabs.com

Re: Qwen3.5 122B and 35B models offer Sonnet 4.5 performance on local computers

#195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Respectfully, from my experience and a few billions of tokens consumed, some opensource models really are strong and useful. Specifically StepFun-3.5-flash https://github.com/stepfun-ai/Step-3.5-Flash I'm working on a pretty complex Rust codebase right now, with hundreds of integration tests and nontrivial concurrency, and stepfun powers through. I have no relation to stepfun, and I'm saying this purely from deep res…

Are you using stepfun mostly because it's free, or is it better than other models at some things?

I also started playing with 3.5 Flash and was impressed.

It’s 2× faster than its competitors. For tasks where “one-shotting” is unrealistic, a fast iteration loop makes a measurable difference in productivity.

Re: Qwen3.5 122B and 35B models offer Sonnet 4.5 performance on local computers

#196
post #69
post #53

I periodically try to run these models on my MBP M3 Max 128G (which I bought with a mind to run local AI). I have a certain deep research question (in a field that is deeply familiar to me) that I ask when I want to gauge model's knowledge. So far Opus 4.6 and Gemini Pro are very satisfactory, producing great answers fairly fast. Gemini is very fast at 30-50 sec, Opus is very detailed and comes at about 2-3 minutes.…

> Wonder what am I doing wrong? You're comparing 100b parameters open models running on a consumer laptop VS private models with at the very least 1t parameters running on racks of bleeding edge professional gpus Local agentic coding is closer to "shit me the boiler plate for an android app" not "deep research questions", especially on your machine

I'll add, AI Labs put a lot of resources into allowing the AI to search the web.. that makes a big difference

Re: Qwen3.5 122B and 35B models offer Sonnet 4.5 performance on local computers

#197
post #170

[dead]

from my personal experience, qwen 30b a3b understand command quiet well as long as the input is not big enough that ruin the attention (I feel the boundary is somewhere between 8000 or 12000?). But that isn't really bug of model itself though. A smaller model just have shorter memory, it's simply physical restriction.

I made a mixed extraction, cleaning, translation, formatting task on job that have average 6000 token input. And so far, only 30b a3b is smart enough not miss job detail (most of time)

I later refactor the task to multi pass using smaller model though. Make job simpler is still a better strategy to get clean output if you can change the pipeline.

Re: Qwen3.5 122B and 35B models offer Sonnet 4.5 performance on local computers

#198
post #53

I periodically try to run these models on my MBP M3 Max 128G (which I bought with a mind to run local AI). I have a certain deep research question (in a field that is deeply familiar to me) that I ask when I want to gauge model's knowledge. So far Opus 4.6 and Gemini Pro are very satisfactory, producing great answers fairly fast. Gemini is very fast at 30-50 sec, Opus is very detailed and comes at about 2-3 minutes.…

Your Gemini or Opus question got send to a Texas datacenter where it got queued and processed by a subunit of 80 h200 140gb 1000w cards running a many billion or trillion parameter model. It took less that 200ms to process a single request. Your Claude cliënt decided to spawn 30 sub agents and iterated in a total of 90 requests totalling about 45000ms. Now compare that to your 100b transistor cpu doing something similar. Yes that would be slow.

Re: Qwen3.5 122B and 35B models offer Sonnet 4.5 performance on local computers

#199
post #159

If you're new to this: All of the open source models are playing benchmark optimization games. Every new open weight model comes with promises of being as good as something SOTA from a few months ago then they always disappoint in actual use. I've been playing with Qwen3-Coder-Next and the Qwen3.5 models since they were each released. They are impressive, but they are not performing at Sonnet 4.5 level in my experien…

I'm using Qwen 3.5 27b on my 4090 and let me tell you. This is the first time I am seriously blown away by coding performance on a local model. They are almost always unusable. Not this time though...

You don't need a coding version of model from Qwen? the 3.5 works?

Re: Qwen3.5 122B and 35B models offer Sonnet 4.5 performance on local computers

#200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Radeon R9700 with 32 GB VRAM is relatively affordable for the amount of RAM and with llama.cpp it runs fast enough for most things. These are workstation cards with blower fans and they are LOUD. Otherwise if you have the money to burn get a 5090 for speeeed and relatively low noise, especially if you limit power usage.

I have a pair of Radeon AI PRO R9700 with 32Gb, and so far they have been a pleasure to use. Drivers work out-of-the-box, and they are completely quiet when unused. They are capped at 300W power, so even at 100% utilization they are not too loud. I was thinking about adding after-market liquid cooling for them, but they're fine without it.

This is great to hear! Out of curiosity, which brand did you go with? I tend to stick to Sapphire but the prices are within $200 of each other.
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