I wonder if Anthropic and OpenAI possibly missed the window to go public. A 27B open-weight model trading blows with the SOTA from just half a year ago is not great news for trillion-dollar investments...
I think I am going to buy a second rtx 3060, as 27B has been just outside of my range for to long, and this looks like the parameter count tipping point
If the benchmarks don't lie, this is getting very close to Opus 4.6 capability - which was the turning point for me for when AI was "good enough" that it became very hard to justify not using it.
I'm sure there's some benchmaxxing going on, and some things you get only with a a larger model.
But I'm feeling pretty confident if not by Gemma 5 than by mid 2028 we'll have local models that are almost always as good as Opus 4.6 was and in many cases far better.
Asking it factual information[1]. You just can't compress the entire human knowledge into a 30GB file.
[1] Without searching the internet. And even if you allow it, you'll get much worse results because search means browsing and parsing the top results, and search results are horrible, whereas internal knowledge from training encompasses the entire internet plus all books including very niche stuff.
IME using 5.6 Luna and DS V4 Flash, I notice that although they are excellent at programming, even Opus-like in the way they try to debug, the thing they are worst at is inferring user intent and making good decisions with little information. They are absolutely terrible at that, will misinterpret small wording ambiguities. I suspect that's an ability you can't add with RL training, that it requires the depth of understanding from vast pre-training.
Similar to the way they asked Sol to solve Erdos problems, that's what I want my model to do for programming.
I don't want to try to take my best educated guess at what the best design is BEFORE implementation - especially if you're designing a feature for a codebase you're not an expert in, you don't know like the back of your hand (i.e. one that is mostly or entirely LLM generated).
What sounds good on paper - often times becomes unideal in practice when you get to the reality of implementation.
It may not be worth re-architecting your entire system to get to a "pure" design that would be the best - all things considered.
Instead, I'd like the model to independently design many plausible and coherent good solutions, then implement each of them, then intelligently pick the few winners (after its fixed any bugs that could be causing promising solutions to look artificially bad) - unless there's an obvious one - and then give me the data I need to make an informed decision on which one to go with, all before I even look at the design or implementation.
You're not getting this from a one shot prompt from a 30B model today. You can't even really get it from Sol or Fable - IME. But you can get somewhat close.
This is a harness problem not a model problem, try prime agent it can do that and it will do it well even :P but you need to prompt it in according to its tools and processes.
I'd love to understand this more. Are you saying the Qwen team spends their very impressive human and compute resources on publishing these amazing models and then botches the chat template with mundane bugs?
Like maybe I just misunderstand what's the hard part but wouldn't you assume that people who can put together an impressive model can also write a proper jinja chat template for it?
Yes for the first question. Google of all companies didn't even get it right with Gemma for a while until recently. For some reason it doesn't seem like people can actually get these templates right.
Why is anyone even using video cards these days? You may as well be burning cash.
This is the perfect candidate for just splattering it on your nvme and then reading it off there and into memory. All of these run perfectly fine on simple m4 silicone:
Qwen3.6-27B has been the main LLM powering my little agentic stack. I have adopted the test and verify approach to any models allowed to run on my machine. When the "heretic" version drops, I will fire up the harness and test. Super excited to see how it stacks up against Qwen3.6!!!
The $1500 Intel B70 with 32GB of VRAM can run this model at max context with good performance, btw. If you don't want to drop $5-10k for running DeepSeek this is your best budget option for local refactor/small scale dev help
I understand the B70 is a bargain vs AMD and especially nVidia offerings, but to me it feels like I would be buying something that would feel too limited in less than a year. 48G would be much more confortable.
And I know the 96G nVidia cards are selling for over 10k$.
Sorry, I wrote autocompletion by force of habit. I simply meant it can complete code you have already created a structure for, which personally is very nice
I thought so, but thanks for the clarification. I am a little bit disappointed that local autocompletion models have been left by the wayside in favor of models post-trained for agentic coding. Both Codestral and Qwen-2.5-coder are more than a year old at this point, but local auto-complete seems to me to be such a great usecase.
The file "Just loads" on llama.cpp, the Unsloth https://huggingface.co/unsloth/Qwen3.8-27B-GGUF is an MTP file, I see mostly the same speed on pp and generation.
There has to be something wrong with those benchmarks, I find extremely hard to believe a 27B model can work similar or exceed opus 4.6.
Worth distinguishing knowledge/task benchmarks from IF / agentic. It doesn't seem out of the question that you can have a small model thats generally good at instruction following and long-horizon agentic, as usually in those cases any requisite knowledge is in the context.
Most of the benchmark improvements afaict are in agentic and instruction following benchmarks.
Yeah, I would appreciate if someone could make sense of the pricing differences between these models. How can a provider run DSv4F at lower cost than a 27B dense or 35B A3B model?
Does it come down to utilization and/or specific model tricks and efficiencies (attention, kv cache, etc.)?
I wish this can run directly on my RTX 4090, seems like 30B is the sweet spot for dense model to run locally, sadly RTX 5090 is very expensive and I need a new PC and new power supply(and UPS) to run that, adding a second RTX 4090 is another option, but not sure if my PC can do that yet.
even a 3090 will give you the VRAM headroom. i run Q8 on an 3090/A6500 combo. well, Q8 of 3.6-27B. I'm building the Q8 GGUF for 3.8 now, assuming mine will finish before someone else's.
I don't know much about the production of these models. How hard would it be to 'fork' something like this and have it not be full of CCP indoctrination?
Since Qwen 3.6 27b outperforms Gemma 4 26b in most benchmarks I'm not sure the value - also Gemma 26b is a MOE model whereas this is a dense model, so not typically direct competitors at their sizes - Gemma 4 31b comparison would be interesting though.
What a weird mechanism. If someone is judging a thread/topic/event impact by the number of points it got, then doing this unfairly degrades that thread.
It should have deduped by user and combined the 168(at the time of writing this comment) + 289 points. Just add the twitter link from the previous thread as an additional link in the description, like you normally do, move all the points over, and remove the old thread.
I'm hoping to see folks distill this with current generation Opus / Fable reasoning traces. I have had my best results locally so far from Qwopus (Qwen 3.6-27B w/ Opus 4.6 reasoning distilled). This looks GREAT and I am definitely setting this up later today.
Need to upgrade to a second 3090! Slowly building up my local models with Krea2, MiniMax H3 (and their new Music3), and now Qwen 3.8
I wonder if Anthropic and OpenAI possibly missed the window to go public. A 27B open-weight model trading blows with the SOTA from just half a year ago is not great news for trillion-dollar investments...
This is why they've been making bank on the secondary market. They can retire now.
I think I am going to buy a second rtx 3060, as 27B has been just outside of my range for to long, and this looks like the parameter count tipping point
If the benchmarks don't lie, this is getting very close to Opus 4.6 capability - which was the turning point for me for when AI was "good enough" that it became very hard to justify not using it.
I'm sure there's some benchmaxxing going on, and some things you get only with a a larger model.
But I'm feeling pretty confident if not by Gemma 5 than by mid 2028 we'll have local models that are almost always as good as Opus 4.6 was and in many cases far better.
What kind of things you only get with a larger model?
Asking it factual information[1]. You just can't compress the entire human knowledge into a 30GB file.
[1] Without searching the internet. And even if you allow it, you'll get much worse results because search means browsing and parsing the top results, and search results are horrible, whereas internal knowledge from training encompasses the entire internet plus all books including very niche stuff.
IME using 5.6 Luna and DS V4 Flash, I notice that although they are excellent at programming, even Opus-like in the way they try to debug, the thing they are worst at is inferring user intent and making good decisions with little information. They are absolutely terrible at that, will misinterpret small wording ambiguities. I suspect that's an ability you can't add with RL training, that it requires the depth of understanding from vast pre-training.
Similar to the way they asked Sol to solve Erdos problems, that's what I want my model to do for programming.
I don't want to try to take my best educated guess at what the best design is BEFORE implementation - especially if you're designing a feature for a codebase you're not an expert in, you don't know like the back of your hand (i.e. one that is mostly or entirely LLM generated).
What sounds good on paper - often times becomes unideal in practice when you get to the reality of implementation.
It may not be worth re-architecting your entire system to get to a "pure" design that would be the best - all things considered.
Instead, I'd like the model to independently design many plausible and coherent good solutions, then implement each of them, then intelligently pick the few winners (after its fixed any bugs that could be causing promising solutions to look artificially bad) - unless there's an obvious one - and then give me the data I need to make an informed decision on which one to go with, all before I even look at the design or implementation.
You're not getting this from a one shot prompt from a 30B model today. You can't even really get it from Sol or Fable - IME. But you can get somewhat close.
This is a harness problem not a model problem, try prime agent it can do that and it will do it well even :P but you need to prompt it in according to its tools and processes.
As usual, the Jinja templates are messed up so use this [0] to reduce or turn off thinking, fix tool calling, keep a 100% KV cache hit rate, etc.
[0] https://huggingface.co/froggeric/Qwen-Fixed-Chat-Templates
I'd love to understand this more. Are you saying the Qwen team spends their very impressive human and compute resources on publishing these amazing models and then botches the chat template with mundane bugs?
Like maybe I just misunderstand what's the hard part but wouldn't you assume that people who can put together an impressive model can also write a proper jinja chat template for it?
Yes for the first question. Google of all companies didn't even get it right with Gemma for a while until recently. For some reason it doesn't seem like people can actually get these templates right.
Yes yes, oh god yes. They also spread FUD in the form of terrible recommended sampler settings.
If you're using llamacpp, turn on top-n-sigma with sigma of 1, turn off top-p/top-k. You'll thank me later.
How is terrible settings a case of FUD?
O joyous day!
Why is anyone even using video cards these days? You may as well be burning cash.
This is the perfect candidate for just splattering it on your nvme and then reading it off there and into memory. All of these run perfectly fine on simple m4 silicone:
https://github.com/drumih/turbo-fieldfare
https://github.com/leonickson1/Swiftlet
https://github.com/sqliteai/warp
Those are all for MoE models. And I prefer measuring my tokens in t/s instead of s/t
Qwen3.6-27B has been the main LLM powering my little agentic stack. I have adopted the test and verify approach to any models allowed to run on my machine. When the "heretic" version drops, I will fire up the harness and test. Super excited to see how it stacks up against Qwen3.6!!!
The $1500 Intel B70 with 32GB of VRAM can run this model at max context with good performance, btw. If you don't want to drop $5-10k for running DeepSeek this is your best budget option for local refactor/small scale dev help
I understand the B70 is a bargain vs AMD and especially nVidia offerings, but to me it feels like I would be buying something that would feel too limited in less than a year. 48G would be much more confortable.
And I know the 96G nVidia cards are selling for over 10k$.
The future can’t arrive fast enough!
I have a B70, what llama options are you using and what performance are you seeing?
You don't need $10k to run DeepSeek, I run it on a $1000 system.
Oh, can it work with the /v1/completions/ auto-complete endpoint?
Sorry, I wrote autocompletion by force of habit. I simply meant it can complete code you have already created a structure for, which personally is very nice
I thought so, but thanks for the clarification. I am a little bit disappointed that local autocompletion models have been left by the wayside in favor of models post-trained for agentic coding. Both Codestral and Qwen-2.5-coder are more than a year old at this point, but local auto-complete seems to me to be such a great usecase.
The file "Just loads" on llama.cpp, the Unsloth https://huggingface.co/unsloth/Qwen3.8-27B-GGUF is an MTP file, I see mostly the same speed on pp and generation. There has to be something wrong with those benchmarks, I find extremely hard to believe a 27B model can work similar or exceed opus 4.6.
Worth distinguishing knowledge/task benchmarks from IF / agentic. It doesn't seem out of the question that you can have a small model thats generally good at instruction following and long-horizon agentic, as usually in those cases any requisite knowledge is in the context.
Most of the benchmark improvements afaict are in agentic and instruction following benchmarks.
This is one of the most important model releases since most use cases don't need SOTA/Frontier
If you want Qwen3.8-27B Serving Configs for the DGX Spark vLLM NVFP4 and RTX 4090 llama.cpp GGUF I added the setups here https://x.com/ErdalToprak/status/2088299678085308761?s=20
Qwen 3.6 is ~$2/m tok, 3.8 should be drop in replacement. Gemma 31B is $0.34/m tok. The price differential on these models is massive on openrouter.
Yeah, I would appreciate if someone could make sense of the pricing differences between these models. How can a provider run DSv4F at lower cost than a 27B dense or 35B A3B model?
Does it come down to utilization and/or specific model tricks and efficiencies (attention, kv cache, etc.)?
DeepInfra prices:
Qwen 3.6 27B: $0.32 in / $3.20 out
Gemma 3 27B: $0.08 in / $0.16 out
DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731: $0.08 in / $0.18 out
Qwen 3.6 35B A3B: $0.10 in / $0.95 out
https://openrouter.ai/qwen/qwen3.6-27b
https://openrouter.ai/google/gemma-3-27b-it
https://openrouter.ai/qwen/qwen3.6-35b-a3b
https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-v4-flash-0731
Where do you see that? From what I can see on Open Router, Qwen 3.6 27B (the closest dense equivalent to Gemma 31) is $0.28/m. Am I missing something?
https://openrouter.ai/qwen/qwen3.6-27b
Would I be surprised there’s bench maxing happening? Yes. But some users also use Q4 quantized and complain how dumb local models are.
I wish this can run directly on my RTX 4090, seems like 30B is the sweet spot for dense model to run locally, sadly RTX 5090 is very expensive and I need a new PC and new power supply(and UPS) to run that, adding a second RTX 4090 is another option, but not sure if my PC can do that yet.
even a 3090 will give you the VRAM headroom. i run Q8 on an 3090/A6500 combo. well, Q8 of 3.6-27B. I'm building the Q8 GGUF for 3.8 now, assuming mine will finish before someone else's.
Others in this thread said it runs on RTX 4090.
Really excited to see what people do with this. 3.7 27B was probably the best compromise between size and intelligence to run on consumer hardware
I am so happy right now, qwen3.6-27b was an absolute game changer. To see another one in the same league.. phew
I don't know much about the production of these models. How hard would it be to 'fork' something like this and have it not be full of CCP indoctrination?
Look for `heretic` fine-tunes in the next couple of days.
Kinda was expecting to see Gemma 4 26B in benchmark comparisons :(
Since Qwen 3.6 27b outperforms Gemma 4 26b in most benchmarks I'm not sure the value - also Gemma 26b is a MOE model whereas this is a dense model, so not typically direct competitors at their sizes - Gemma 4 31b comparison would be interesting though.
I see! Thanks.
Why weren't the points merged again from the "dupe" thread that had 289 points?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49299684
What a weird mechanism. If someone is judging a thread/topic/event impact by the number of points it got, then doing this unfairly degrades that thread.
It should have deduped by user and combined the 168(at the time of writing this comment) + 289 points. Just add the twitter link from the previous thread as an additional link in the description, like you normally do, move all the points over, and remove the old thread.
Can anyone confirm whether this new Qwen release is any more concise when thinking? Overthinking was the biggest (only?) downside of the Qwen models.
I'm hoping to see folks distill this with current generation Opus / Fable reasoning traces. I have had my best results locally so far from Qwopus (Qwen 3.6-27B w/ Opus 4.6 reasoning distilled). This looks GREAT and I am definitely setting this up later today.
This is the homelab model hands down