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Qwen3.6-Plus: Towards real world agents

qwen.ai

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Re: Qwen3.6-Plus: Towards real world agents

#81

Post by miki123211 »

jstummbillig wrote: post #64
Aurornis wrote: post #11

This is their hosted-only model, not an open weight model like they’ve become known for. They got a lot of good publicity for their open weight model releases, which was the goal. The hard part is pivoting from an open weight provider to being considered as a competitor to Claude and ChatGPT. Initial reactions are mostly anger from everyone who didn’t realize that the play along was to give away the smaller models as…

> Initial reactions are mostly anger from everyone who didn’t realize that the play along was to give away the smaller models as advertising, not because they were feeling generous. The naivety around this has been staggering quite frankly. All of a sudden, people thinking that meta etc are releasing free models because they believe in open access and distribution of knowledge. No, they just suck comparatively. There…

I thought Qwen was releasing open-weight because China can't compete with America (because of people's privacy concerns), so the only thing they could do is salt the ground economically with open models, and make sure everybody loses.

Apparently that wasn't actually the play here.

Re: Qwen3.6-Plus: Towards real world agents

#83

Post by daft_pink »

the_pwner224 wrote: post #28
daft_pink wrote: post #13

Not really interested in using models hosted on alibaba cloud. Like Qwen local for it’s privacy, but I trust the privacy of Google/OpenAI/Anthropic more than alibaba.

I had the exact opposite reaction. I stopped using OpenAI/Google a while ago due to privacy and moved to local Qwen, now I'm considering using Alibaba cloud. You know Google and OpenAI are going to share everything with the US government and Western ad networks. But with Alibaba, who cares if the CCP & Chinese ad networks have a comprehensive profile on me? From a pragmatic perspective it's much better for (outcomes…

So I guess if it’s your personal data that’s up to you, but if you have private client data and client of your client data and that’s the fundamental reason why you are doing local ai, I can’t imagine moving from qwen local to qwen alibaba after not choosing google/anthropic/openai

Re: Qwen3.6-Plus: Towards real world agents

#84

Post by zozbot234 »

miki123211 wrote: post #81
jstummbillig wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Initial reactions are mostly anger from everyone who didn’t realize that the play along was to give away the smaller models as advertising, not because they were feeling generous. The naivety around this has been staggering quite frankly. All of a sudden, people thinking that meta etc are releasing free models because they believe in open access and distribution of knowledge. No, they just suck comparatively. There…

I thought Qwen was releasing open-weight because China can't compete with America (because of people's privacy concerns), so the only thing they could do is salt the ground economically with open models, and make sure everybody loses. Apparently that wasn't actually the play here.

Qwen is actually a pretty strong player in the Chinese market. There is an implied "salt the ground" play but it's mostly from hardware makers, who are trying to keep the big AI players honest and also stand to gain if local inference becomes popular.

Re: Qwen3.6-Plus: Towards real world agents

#85

Post by threetonesun »

nickvec wrote: post #63
Alifatisk wrote: post #57

I understand peoples reactions of Qwen team comparing against Opus 4.5 instead of 4.6. And them comparing against Gemini Pro 3.0 instead of 3.1. But calling it misleading is a bit of stretch in my eyes, people here are acting like we immediately forgot how previous generations performed just because a new version is released. This field is going in a incredible pace, the providers release a new model every quarter or…

I think it’s more the principle of deception that upsets people. Imagine if Apple released a new iPhone and publicly compared its specs to some previous gen Android. It’s not in good faith.

They compared their M-series chips to older Intel Macs for a while, likely to target users who were still on Intel chips. If they released a lower cost iPhone and compared it to a previous gen Android I could see the reasoning for it. It's not deception if it's a valid comparison and people just fail to understand what's being compared.

Now, is it mildly deceptive because all of the companies using incredibly confusing naming conventions for their models? Maybe!

Re: Qwen3.6-Plus: Towards real world agents

#86

Post by vidarh »

FuckButtons wrote: post #33
thegeomaster wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And it seems they've decided to go closed-source for their largest, best models.

3.5-plus was also only available via api. I don’t know what the long term business model for open weights is, I hope there is one, but it seems foolish to assume that companies will be willing to spend millions of dollars of compute on an asset worth zero in perpetuity.

The business case is to salt the earth for new competitors, coupled with marketing.

Re: Qwen3.6-Plus: Towards real world agents

#87

Post by Someone1234 »

thinkcontext wrote: post #55
Someone1234 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There isn't, pretty much everyone wants the best of the best. For direct user interaction or coding problems, perhaps. But as API calls get cheaper, it becomes more realistic to use them for completely automated workflows against data-sets, or as sub-agents called from expensive SOTA models. For example, in Claude, using Opus as an orchestrator to call Sonnet sub-agents, is a popular usage "hack." That only gets mo…

> But as API calls get cheaper, it becomes more realistic to use them for completely automated workflows against data-sets Seems like a huge waste of money and electricity for processes that can be implemented as a traditional deterministic program. One would hope that tools would identify recurrent jobs that can be turned into simple scripts.

It depends on the specific task.

For example: "Here our dataset that contains customer feedback comment fields; look through them, draw out themes, associations, and look for trends." Solving that with a deterministic program isn't a trivial problem, and it is likely cheaper solved via LLM.

Re: Qwen3.6-Plus: Towards real world agents

#90

Post by usagisushi »

esafak wrote: post #24

Does anyone have experience with Alibaba's coding plan? Not that I'm very tempted at $50/month...

A bit off-topic but I’m on the legacy Lite plan (now discontinued), and it’s more than enough for hobby projects. The main draw is the generous request-based quota (18k requests/month) rather than a token-based one.

This means a 100k token request counts the same as a 100-token one. I’ve made about 8000 requests in the last two weeks, averaging around 80k tokens per request. It feels like they’re subsidizing this just to gather data on agentic workflows.

On the downside, the speed is mediocre (15–30 tg/s for GLM-5), and I’ve seen the model glitch or produce broken output about 10 times out of those 8k requests.

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