Qwen 3.8 27B

270 points - today at 3:00 PM

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Comments

hypfer today at 4:32 PM
Since it might be helpful to some, here's my current commandline for llama.cpp running on an RTX 4090 with my monitor moved to the iGPU to free up all of its VRAM.

llama-server -m Qwen3.8-27B-IQ4_NL.gguf --mmproj mmproj-BF16.gguf -c 170000 --parallel 1 -ngl -1 --cache-type-k q8_0 --cache-type-v q8_0 -b 1024 -ub 512 --flash-attn on --no-context-shift --no-mmproj-offload --spec-type draft-mtp --spec-draft-n-max 5 --spec-default --cache-type-k-draft q4_0 --cache-type-v-draft q4_0 --threads 24 --jinja --reasoning on -fit off

Identical to the qwen3.6 config. With a prompt like "svg owl" (which can reuse quite a lot compared with creative writing or similar, so ngram-mod shines), I get about 70-80t/s like this, with a memory overclock of about 1.5GHz

KronisLV today at 3:12 PM
I hope really badly that we'll get a new 35B A3B or similar MoE model!

I also miss the Qwen 3 Coder Next, which was 80B A3B, there are quite a few use cases where a non-dense model <100B would be the sweet spot (when you have the VRAM but not the TDP or compute power). Heck, I'd gladly take A5B or A8B or even A10B as a sort of middle ground.

Also alternate link for viewing the images without signing in: https://xcancel.com/Alibaba_Qwen/status/2088280182356611304

scrlk today at 3:11 PM
Beats Opus 4.7 Max (w/ Claude Code) on DeepSWE (42.2 vs 40). Looks like Qwen's 27B models continue to pack some punch.

Unsloth's GGUF quants are up: https://huggingface.co/unsloth/Qwen3.8-27B-GGUF

ramon156 today at 3:42 PM
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 about speed and efficiency right now. For my setup I would like to have 2-3 different model families. I've settled on GLM-5.3 (formerly Deepseek v4 pro 0813) for architecting, Deepseek V4 Pro 0813 for developing, and Gemini flash lite (any recent cheap model) for repo scouting. I'll add another one in the mix for reviewing (in this case Gemini 3.7) and that's all I need.

I've tried most models except Grok.

Qwen is too expensive IMO (Alibaba Cloud subscriptions are hard to come by and I'm not spending 50 euros a month for a tool, so 18 euros it is). If it ever becomes efficient enough to run locally I will definitely look back.

Claude is slow and expensive (the cache hit prices are absurd).

OAI is pretty good, I might add it to my arsenal seeing how cheap it is.

These opinions change every day. Last week I would've never picked Deepseek until I read about the pricing. even post aug 16 it's worth it (although it's getting close to gemini pricing).

Right now my costs are 12 euros a month (z.ai) + whatever deepseek consumes. This typically isn't more than 8 euros a week. 44 euros a month and I have a setup that is doing pretty well.

literoldolphin today at 5:33 PM
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

onlyrealcuzzo today at 3:16 PM
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.

satvikpendem today at 5:05 PM
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

jedbrooke today at 3:21 PM
I hope the bonsai team makes another 1bit quant of this model (or releases code/instructions on how to do it), using the Qwen3.6 27B on my 16GB mac mini has been wild . The 1bit quant feels like opus level… for the first couple turns. Then it has trouble eg switching from plan mode to act mode. This is mostly mitigated by starting a new session. (tbf this limitation is called out on the hf page)

I saw unsloth has 1bit quants too so I might check that out, anybody have experience with those?

Casteil today at 4:04 PM
One thing a lot of people don't seem to factor when hyping Qwen is how much models like this tend to 'overthink' with seemingly endless 'second guessing'. 3.8 seems no different from what I've tried thus far.

As capable as it is, it's hard to justify using it when a competing model (e.g. Gemma4:26b-a3b) can consistently achieve the same or similar response with only 1/10th as many 'thinking' tokens, achieve much higher tokens/second, and take a small fraction of the time. I suppose 'YMMV' depending on your use case.

Also, I haven't used it enough yet to see if it's prone to infinite looping, but its predecessors sure were.

TomGarden today at 3:16 PM
Any tips on the best approach at running this at an M4 Max 128GB? Token throughput was a bit slow with the last 27B one (MLX), ended up using the A3B variant but if I could get this one to reasonable speed I'd much prefer it.
NorwegianDude today at 3:16 PM
If the benchmarks are a real indication, we now have a local model that is runnable on a high-end personal PC that trades blows with the leading model Claude Opus 4.6 Max from half a year ago.

Insane if that is the case. Downloading now!

syntaxing today at 5:26 PM
Would I be surprised there’s bench maxing happening? Yes. But some users also use Q4 quantized and complain how dumb local models are.
T0mSIlver today at 3:48 PM
Unsloth Q4_K_M on a single 3090, llama.cpp "Generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle" first try https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1voa3ch/comment...
xlayn today at 3:29 PM
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.
Almondsetat today at 4:52 PM
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
erdaltoprak today at 3:05 PM
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

tosh today at 3:11 PM
27b dense model at Opus 4.6 level

Opus at home

I hope there also will be a new ~10b variant

piyh today at 3:39 PM
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.
mraza007 today at 4:33 PM
Man what a week, We just had GLM 5.3 that came out and then we had smaller local model Qwen3.8-27B from Qwen

Just tried using Pi Agent and looks very promising

deleted today at 4:48 PM
chvid today at 3:08 PM
These are massive improvements - and something you can actually run on a laptop.
mickeyp today at 3:31 PM
Model benchmarks are useful, to a point, but it is the long tail of things you do with the model that determines if it's good at a wide range of activities. Ant/OAI, to their credit, build their models -- even the small ones -- so they follow instructions and do tool calling well, without the system prompts confusing them. This is especially important for long-horizon tool calling.

So one open weight model might "meet" Opus or whatever on benchmarks, but then fail to follow a simple answer format and also tool call correctly. The models are whipped to within an inch of their lives to strictly adhere to their post training quality gates.

theanonymousone today at 3:41 PM
I'm wondering whether any provider can offer this for cheaper $/token than the new DSv4 Flash, which is both cheaper and smarter :/

Completely local use is a different story, of course.

minimaltom today at 4:10 PM
Architecture thread! Afaict they continue to use gated attention + delta net, which was also adopted+adapted by K3, but im surprised theres no improvements to the residual stream (deepseek are using manifold hyper-connections, kimi have attention residuals) ?

Perf improvements seem to all come from training?

bertili today at 4:20 PM
Wow. Speed improved as well. 200t/s on a RTX 5090!

https://x.com/sgl_project/status/2088281320422322413

arjie today at 4:16 PM
I use the Qwens as a vision model for my DeepSeek V4 Flashes to handle. But the Qwens run on old RTX A6000 Ampere. Does anyone know if there's any news about INT4/AWQ quants for the RTX A6000?
synergy20 today at 3:39 PM
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.
irthomasthomas today at 4:15 PM
Why don't qwen/alibaba host the model themselves? I was looking forward to trying it on their coding plan. Google are the same way with their Gemma models.
TomGarden today at 3:02 PM
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
ThouYS today at 3:17 PM
I am so happy right now, qwen3.6-27b was an absolute game changer. To see another one in the same league.. phew
deleted today at 3:10 PM
jlkivey today at 3:50 PM
Note: on the model card the comparison to Opus is Opus 4.6 Max, not 4.7
kunver today at 3:16 PM
Looks like a pretty significant improvement on the DeepSWE benchmark compared to the previous 27B model.
yassa9 today at 3:35 PM
Can anyone who has that specific personal test he tries on different models , and tries this model , to tell us here if possible , how good or bad is this new model ? compared to others ?

I only trust those users genuine personal tests

kristopolous today at 3:12 PM
q4km is about 48 tps on a 4090. my llama.cpp params are --flash-attn on --parallel 1 --load-mode mmap
ThouYS today at 3:30 PM
3.6-27B on little-coder was already mind blowing. looking forward to this guy!
davidw today at 5:19 PM
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?
anana_ today at 3:15 PM
Monstrous benchmarks! Hoping it is not benchmaxxed.
tosh today at 3:21 PM
also cool: Qwen 3.8 27b is multi modal!
lossolo today at 5:09 PM
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.

naasking today at 5:07 PM
Can anyone confirm whether this new Qwen release is any more concise when thinking? Overthinking was the biggest (only?) downside of the Qwen models.
pu_pe today at 3:25 PM
Seems to be SOTA for its size. Hopefully independent benchmarks will come soon.
kunver today at 3:15 PM
Welcome deepseek flash flash!
deleted today at 3:15 PM
expedited123 today at 3:14 PM
Kinda was expecting to see Gemma 4 26B in benchmark comparisons :(
tristor today at 4:59 PM
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.
altruios today at 3:14 PM
remember to let llama.cpp catch up to anything new in this model. Save your judgment until about 2 weeks of use.
filup today at 3:47 PM
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48403639

my prediction was way too far out. 4.6 at home! Woo.

brcmthrowaway today at 3:25 PM
This with ddg mcp to fill in world knowledge. Are local models the future when computer architectures catch up?
alpha_trion today at 3:16 PM
NICE, i've been waiting for this drop, thanks for posting this
Mr_Eri_Atlov today at 3:38 PM
This is the homelab model hands down
cmrdporcupine today at 4:46 PM
I found this kind of amusing while running it (using Pi as the harness). Don't know if this is evidence of intense fine tuning from Claude but it smells like it...

" The user wants me to explore the repository at XXXX and report back. Let me start by understanding the project structure, reading the CLAUDE.md file, and getting a general overview of what this repository is.

Let me start by reading the main project documentation and exploring the directory structure.

I'll take a look around this repo. Let me start by getting a lay of the land.

read resource CLAUDE.md (ctrl+o to expand)

ENOENT: no such file or directory, access 'XXXX/CLAUDE.md'"

brcmthrowaway today at 3:11 PM
My Strix Halo is about to go overdrive!
ramon156 today at 3:28 PM
need another fable uncensored merge with 3.8, really curious what it can deliver
RobertasTa today at 4:24 PM
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steffi_oliver today at 4:50 PM
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fintuner today at 4:13 PM
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deleted today at 3:29 PM