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Qwen 3.8 27B

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Re: Qwen 3.8 27B

#512
post #421
post #419

Absolutely 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…

For anyone who followed yesterday's Gemini 3.7 Flash pelican which rendered in Safari but not in Firefox or Chrome... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49289112#49290012 . - that turned out to be my fault, not the model. My SVG rendering software was stripping some attributes. Here's the Gemini 3.7 Flash pelicans in the fixed renderer: https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer.html#u...

Holy crap that is above and beyond

But, not animated like the Qwen 2.4T one you showed, so minus points for that

Re: Qwen 3.8 27B

#513
post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm convinced a lot of the anti-open-weight model comments at this point are inorganic traffic - there's trillions in investor money riding on a world where these models aren't cheap commodities. Having actually used things like the recent GLM, Kimi, and Qwen I think any edge the labs have is marginal at most and actually prefer the open weight models in most day to day usage. Anthropic's recent releases are wordy to…

When stuff like this: https://doublespeed.ai/ exists I don't find that hard to believe at all, although it cuts both ways

Amazing, looking forward to stuff like this killing social media. Or at least forcing the use of robust ID/KYC checks to verify human accounts.

Re: Qwen 3.8 27B

#515
post #421
post #419

Absolutely 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…

For anyone who followed yesterday's Gemini 3.7 Flash pelican which rendered in Safari but not in Firefox or Chrome... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49289112#49290012 . - that turned out to be my fault, not the model. My SVG rendering software was stripping some attributes. Here's the Gemini 3.7 Flash pelicans in the fixed renderer: https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer.html#u...

Perhaps this isn’t a new observation but the problem with LLMs is very clear with these. It’s a nice microcosm. The LLM will draw a fish companion (unprompted!) with a nice gradient but won’t get the pelican’s feet right.

It’s obviously a problem of fundamental understanding and demonstrates that reasoning is more “directionless rigour”.

Re: Qwen 3.8 27B

#516

People will claim it's not comparable to Opus despite it beating the score. I'm not sure I disagree, but I'm also unsure whether I care. Most new models nowadays are "good enough". I cannot complain because I'd rather spend that time improving my prompts and docs. Opus might be a _slight bit better_ at picking up vague hints, but it's also extremely expensive, and I hit the 5 hour limit way too quick. I care a lot ab…

Grok 4.6 is a game-changer. I have yet to go back to other models after starting to use it. You just can't beat the price + output quality (even K3 is more expensive)

Re: Qwen 3.8 27B

#517
post #421
post #419

Absolutely 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…

For anyone who followed yesterday's Gemini 3.7 Flash pelican which rendered in Safari but not in Firefox or Chrome... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49289112#49290012 . - that turned out to be my fault, not the model. My SVG rendering software was stripping some attributes. Here's the Gemini 3.7 Flash pelicans in the fixed renderer: https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer.html#u...

It is interesting that it went with something like:

"pelican = ocean bird = nautical theme = this means I should put a captain's hat on the cartoon Pelican"

I think in some sense it understood the absurdity of a pelican riding a bicycle as intentionally nonsensical, so it went with a cartoon theme for the design and the shading. Worked out really well.

Re: Qwen 3.8 27B

#518
Credit where it's due. Qwen 3.8 27B is only the second local model after Gemma 4 that managed to correctly reason through one of my private benchmarks. It took 5x as many tokens to do it and 12m30s with MTP enabled, but it did do it.

Gemma 4 reasoned through it more implicitly, while Qwen 3.8 reasoned more explicitly. Laguna and Muse Glimmer failed hard on it, though they're useful for other tasks.

The VRAM usage seems way less efficient than Gemma 4 or Glimmer though, with 32K of context taking 2.5GB of VRAM. With those, even with MTP or a DFlash model loaded, you could still fit 256k-768k of context. With Qwen 3.8 27B I can't even fit 128k if I quantize V to Q4_0. Maybe with some trial and error I can find some settings that perform well enough with a larger context window that it's still useful for longer tasks.

Lots more testing to do, though I was getting some decent results out of Muse Glimmer which was more than twice as fast and supported huge context windows, managing to solve some bugs that Gemma 4 struggled with. I can't even begin to throw that task at Qwen, because just the prompt alone would use the entire context window and then it would reason for probably that same amount.

If you've got a 32GB card, it should be a decent model even if it really is memory hungry.

EDIT: Tried a few kv cache quantization settings, but it failed with those. I designed this benchmark to be pretty brutal in the face of KLD and any reasoning quality loss, so it's not too surprising. Gemma 4's QAT held up pretty well, at least and could consistently complete it.

Re: Qwen 3.8 27B

#520
post #419

Absolutely 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…

I think the model got trained only on pelican to get there

We should start asking it for an Albatross instead.
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