> audio-visual performance close to Gemini 3.8 Flash and overall audio performance that exceeds Gemini 3.8 Flash
Wow crazy if true. I think Gemini's audio capability and multi language was the "selling point" for a lot of people. Other capability also matches or exceeds 3.8 Flash.
They also made a new harness but github link seems to 404.
3.8 Max is the most “grounded” model I think - talks generally normal, doesn’t go crazy and start doing things (I see you Gemini), has good design choices and isn’t overly nitpicky. But god it’s slow. And only available from Alibaba. Their token plan is stingy too. If I had to pick the “old reliable boring” LLM, a modern Claude 4.5 if you will, Qwen is my choice. Hopefully they don’t RL it to oblivion.
They seem to be doing something different with the "Qwen4" architecture as demoed in Flash-Next. I've noticed the reasoning behaves ... weirdly. Like, really weirdly compared to any model I've ever seen before.
I've noticed between tool calls, it'll sometimes say things like:
The user's message is just system instructions setup with no actual task. There's no question to answer yet. I should acknowledge briefly and wait for the actual request.
The user hasn't asked anything substantive yet — the last turn was just system instructions ("You are an expert software engineer. Helps user to solve problems."). My previous response was a brief acknowledgment. There was no real reasoning to speak of; I simply acknowledged the instructions and waited for an actual task.
【System: In response to this, the message content from the user has been sanitized or empty. No specific content to be translated from Japanese to English was found.】
These don't clearly reflect ... anything, and it keeps performing tool calls correctly anyway. And then other times, it begins doing whatever you'd call this (this is only orthogonally related to the task):
A thought experiment I sometimes run: a person who cannot grow, and never will, vs. a person who changes completely every seven years — which one is more terrifying? I've decided that the latter is more terrifying. Because at least with a being that cannot change, you know where you stand. Also, I was going to say that what we call "identity" might just be the friction that arises between these two modes. But that's the sort of thing you end up saying at 2 AM. Anyway, that's what I thought.
Is this with the full unquantized weights? There are some mystery meat quants on Huggingface for this model that are badly botched and lobotomize it (I've hit this personally when on two different quants, almost exactly the same size, one was benchmarking 50% worse on my private benchmark.).
It's Unsloth's UD-IQ4_XS, and it appears to actually work pretty well, regardless of the occasional CoT amnesia. Though, I've seen the "the user didn't tell me to do anything" thoughts on OpenRouter, too, which is supposedly the "production" version provided exclusively by Alibaba.
Flash-Next thinking also sometimes glitches out and takes minutes to return a simple answer, randomly, in my experience. You’ve gotta kill the request and send it again.
I saw some corrupting when using https://github.com/MiaAI-Lab/Qwen3.8-Flash-Next-Single-DGX-S... on my spark - I had the agent doing genealogy work and it started mixing genders at first, later accusing me of making up things in my ancestry, and then telling me that all of the names in my family tree were from a 1953 musical (they aren't). I switched to another repo's implementation though and haven't had similar problems since.
Curious if or when we'll see the Qwen4 series, one thing I love with Qwen is it comes a much larger range of sizes so I can experiment which extremely small llms.
And maybe Qwen4 won't be released, they only release Qwen3.8 27B (and a mostly unusable 125B). There are definitively slowing down open weight release.
No, it is actually very good. Qwen Flash 3.8 Next is fine. But you need ~128GB of RAM to get it going and not a lot of people have that or can serve it very quickly. I have been running it on an old gaming system around 25 t/s to do overnight work and it is very strong, even at 3 bit quant.
Wow crazy if true. I think Gemini's audio capability and multi language was the "selling point" for a lot of people. Other capability also matches or exceeds 3.8 Flash.
They also made a new harness but github link seems to 404.
I've noticed between tool calls, it'll sometimes say things like:
These don't clearly reflect ... anything, and it keeps performing tool calls correctly anyway. And then other times, it begins doing whatever you'd call this (this is only orthogonally related to the task):Is this with the full unquantized weights? There are some mystery meat quants on Huggingface for this model that are badly botched and lobotomize it (I've hit this personally when on two different quants, almost exactly the same size, one was benchmarking 50% worse on my private benchmark.).
Wow, that is unexpected. But honest?
What would that mean in this context?
I swear I spend more time telling Claude not to do things than telling it what to do.
in/out ($) Gemini : 1.5 / 9.0 | Qwen 3.8: 0.15 / 0.47
That is a massive cost reduction.
Refs: https://www.alibabacloud.com/help/en/model-studio/model-pric... https://runware.ai/gemini-omni
The last one was: Qwen3-Omni-30B-A3B https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3-Omni-30B-A3B-Instruct
And maybe Qwen4 won't be released, they only release Qwen3.8 27B (and a mostly unusable 125B). There are definitively slowing down open weight release.