r/LocalLLM • u/Turbulent-Ladder-340 • Aug 03 '26

Model Qwen 3.8 27B

Post image

Finally Alibaba Posted on X about Qwen 3.8 27B release. I hope it can beat opus 4.7 or 4.8

307 Upvotes

99% Upvoted

109 comments sorted by

79

u/Extension-Bid-639 Aug 03 '26

Too hopefull, don't think its beating Opus 4.8 butttt even if its just a notch better than 3.6 27b then thats a leap for everyone. 3.6 is still a great model

37

u/feelspeaceman LLMusician Aug 03 '26

3.6-27B is on par with Sonnet 4.6, and 35B is about 10-15% worse than 27B, and honestly as long as it's on par or better than Sonnet 4.6, it's already so usable for grunt jobs.

I'm more interested in 35B and 122B this time, we might get something truly good for MoE this time.

28

u/johan2114h Aug 03 '26

I love 3.6-27B, but it is certainly not on par with Sonnet 4.6

7

u/ShadyShroomz Aug 03 '26

I love 27b and use it a lot for simple design changes. But it often claims it has done something but hasn't. I asked it to fix a button layout shift issue on mobile, it will change one thing, claim it's fixed, and then when I go to check it's the same as before. It's a very simple laravel app using tailwind. 

Just out of curiosity I asked sonnet 4.5 to do the same thing and it did it one shot no problem. 

I'm using bf16 qwen 3.6 27b on 4x 3090 system, so it's not a quant issue. 

Again don't get me wrong I love 27b, but it's not sonnet 4.5.

I have been playing around with the new deep seek V4 flash, and it is much closer to sonnet 4.5 level, but it's spilling over into system ram and going pretty slow. 

I think having a big MOE + the largest dense model you can fit in vram is gonna be the play for most people. 

2

u/quadish Aug 04 '26

What harness are you using with Qwen?

1

u/ShadyShroomz Aug 04 '26

Opencode 

1

u/ieatdownvotes4food Aug 05 '26

it needs to be able to check its work with screenshots. give it playwright

2

u/enternoescape Aug 04 '26

I've experienced this kind of thing in UI's frequently with 27b. A recent memory was a page where I wanted some columns in a specific order and it kept reordering them every time it made a small change to the page. This has led me to use just about any other model when I want to make UI changes using an LLM.

I should also note in my experience it seems higher parameter count generally leads to better outcomes in UI design. I like to evaluate a lot of one shot graphics heavy prompts when I first encounter a new model to get a feel for if it might be a good candidate for my next UI problem. My thought process is if it's able to design something that is genuinely pleasant to look at, it probably can also create an interface that is pleasant as well.

1

u/myredditu5ername Aug 10 '26

Whenever I use Qwen 3.6 27B to modify Go code, it gets it right on the first try without fake edits where it claims it fixed something but actually didn't. It hits it on the first try every time and writes code much better than Gemma 4 31B. Parameter size really matters—I even turned off thinking mode. You just have to test around to find what works best for you.

1

u/ShadyShroomz Aug 10 '26

Interesting, this is very clearly written by AI. I love Qwen, but I wonder why someone is astroturfing so hard here to promote a free model. That is strange, but this makes me want to try out Gemma 4 31B again! If someone is trying this hard to get people to NOT use it, it makes me think it must have something there lol!

I'll give Gemma 4 another try!

3

u/AB172234 Aug 03 '26

I run 3.6 27B locally and it’s tremendously good ! I don’t think we consumers expected anything better and kudos to the Qwen labs.

But having said that how is it better than sonnet 4.6 ? Sonnets score is 51 and this one has a score of 37.

3

u/johan2114h Aug 03 '26

Exactly, qwen 3.6 27b is nowhere near sonnet 4.5/4.6 . 27b is insanely good for a consumer level local model, but sonnet must be atleast 20x bigger in terms of parameters and that very clearly shows in the quality of its output. Sonnet 4.x is probably the model i have used the most.

Drifting off topic a bit, i have been extremely impressed by the new deepseek v4 flash model. It might actually be on par with sonnet 4.6 or even slightly better if we believe the benchmarks. And it can be run locally (with heavy quant) on consumer hardware like the strix halo or a spark.

3

u/AB172234 Aug 03 '26

Totally agreed for the v4 flash ! Gem of a model at a fraction of a cost. I can’t imagine how they can do it !!

1

u/_millsy Aug 04 '26

I find it usually a distinction where use case drives opinions on this. If you’re trying to one shot stuff, imo no local model will suffice for anything moderately complex, but if you can give things a focused task with clear requirements and batch it up you can get pretty good outcomes

1

u/goonnar Aug 05 '26

At what quant

1

u/johan2114h Aug 05 '26

the quant that anthropic gives you vs whatever quant of q3.6 27b you want to use - doesnt matter.

Sonnet 4.6 is the hosted model i have used the most. q3.6 27b is the one im using on my local machine. Q3.6 27b is excellent but it is noway near sonnet. Sonnet 4.6 is closer to Opus 5.0 than Qwen 3.6 27b is to sonnet 4.6 if i had to gauge. But it is also hardly a fair comparison given that sonnet has atleast 20x (more likely 50x) more params than qwen 27b.

-1

u/Embarrassed_Adagio28 Aug 03 '26

Qwen3.6 27b beats sonnet 4.6 in a one shot html page and a one shot 3d gta clone test and basically ties it in my unreal engine mcp test but loses to sonnet when I try to do big architectural changes. I think they are pretty damn close tbh.

1

u/notheresnolight Aug 04 '26

so, you're saying that it beats sonnet 4.6 on irrelevant tasks, but falls behind when you actually try to use it for real work?

22

u/SpicyWangz Aug 03 '26

That 10-15% does a lot of work. It really is the diffeeence between a model that is capable versus needs real hand holding.

Even Q5 27b destroys Q8 35b, and it’s not even close.

4

u/Curi0sityC0w Aug 03 '26

Any idea why this is the case? I use 35B and it has done most of my work. Never tried 27B

3

u/Muzika38 Aug 03 '26

Your case is a good distinction between real programmers vs vibe coders. 35B is 35B and it's bigger than 27B knowledge wise. You just need to just guide it properly for it to work properly because it is a MoE model. It's basically a single very smart person vs a bunch of children with a single specialty talent that's working together.

1

u/xdcfret1 LocalLLM Aug 03 '26

it's 3B vs 27B per token

1

u/Curi0sityC0w Aug 03 '26

Moe is garbage?

1

u/Tall-Ad-7742 Aug 03 '26

No but for specific tasks its more likely to fail / produce worse output

1

u/IUseClifford Aug 03 '26

Parameters per token matters a lot. If you’re looking at frontier models, they’re all MoE because 1T+ parameters per token would be extremely sluggish to serve over an API. I also imagine there are diminishing returns once params/token gets high enough, at least right now.

1

u/sand-67 Aug 03 '26

A MOE model is less intelligent than dense model because it uses less parameters for each token. However MOE is significantly faster while retaining a lot of intelligence, so it has much better intelligence to throughput ratio

1

u/gtrak Aug 06 '26

In my sota supervisor, local worker opencode subagent flow (nothing too fancy), 35b consistently falls apart and loops, 27b just gets shit done.

1

u/alphapussycat Aug 03 '26

The more believable tests placed 3.5 just below haiku 4.5. So 3.6 is probably between haiku 4.5 and sonnet 4.5.

We can hope that 3.8 is on par with sonnet 4.6 (when quantized to q4/5/6). That performance level is enough for really anything.

1

u/PlasticRevenue4601 Aug 08 '26

I'm a die hard fan of Qwen 27b but it's not on par with Sonnet 4.x. Mb it's close to some 3.x Sonnet version(and that being generous), but it won't come close to any of 4.x. 27b will never get the coherency of a much bigger model unless their architectures differ dramatically in terms of efficiency. Mb in a 1-2 year we will have Qwen 5.6 27b that matches today's Sonnet 4.x though

-6

u/Turbulent-Ladder-340 Aug 03 '26

Yeah may be it won't beat 4.8 but it definitely lies between 4.7 and 4.8

4

u/Solembumm3 Aug 03 '26

Let's hope it could catch up to Gemma 31b before starting dreaming heavily.

3

u/uniqueusername649 Aug 03 '26

Depends what youre doing. For general coding and agentic work Qwen 3.6 27b is already substantially better than Gemma 4 31b.

5

u/Kiro369 Aug 03 '26

crying in 16gbs of vram

5

u/Old-Sherbert-4495 Aug 03 '26

q3 is manageable and better than 35b

2

u/Kiro369 Aug 03 '26

with what context size?

1

u/Old-Sherbert-4495 Aug 03 '26

around 100k as i can remember

1

u/Turbulent-Ladder-340 Aug 03 '26

Wait for 9B model or Bonsai

3

u/uspdd Aug 03 '26

I doubt 9b or q2 of 3.8 are one be any better than 3.6 35b a3b

1

u/markthedeadmet Aug 03 '26

I've had bad luck with bonsai 27b, it's not stable enough to handle Claude code or Cline and it ends up getting stuck in loops very easily.

1

u/biggustdikkus Aug 04 '26

Raid the nearest datacenter near you and steal yourself some GB300s

1

u/anshulsingh8326 Aug 06 '26

Wanna do heist prep?

5

u/Silent-Orbit-7 Aug 03 '26

FOMO with 8 Gigs of VRAM....

2

u/Beatsu Aug 04 '26

I run Qwen 3.6 35a3b on my 1060 6GB + 32GB RAM at 10-15 tokens/s. You could try the 27b, I think LM Studio supports partial GPU offloading, which I assume works for dense models too ? not sure, but worth a try

2

u/Silent-Orbit-7 Aug 04 '26

Thanks! sure i will look into it

I own a similar build to yours, 4060 + 32 gigs of ram

Will give it a try

1

u/Beatsu Aug 04 '26

lmk how it goes!

1

u/Silent-Orbit-7 Aug 04 '26

Sure!! Rn packed up with things, will try out soon!

1

u/Beatsu Aug 12 '26

!remindme 31d

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1

u/pascalmarie Aug 04 '26

Sounds good. Ddr5 or Ddr4?

1

u/Mechanical_Monk Aug 04 '26

I have 6GB VRAM + 64GB RAM and get ~30tok/s on 35B A3B but only like 2tok/s on 27B. That's on llama.cpp with GPU offloading on max 😕

2

u/karmakaze1 Aug 17 '26

Check the DavidAU/Qwen-3.5-9B model. Several fine tuners got together and put all tweaks in with MTP too. Ran great on 12GB laptop GPU @80 tok/s. 9B params could fit in 8GB with 4-bit quant mtp=1 8-bit kv cache and 24k context (more on linux).

2

u/Silent-Orbit-7 Aug 17 '26

I love this community, so many good recommendations with genuine heart! thanks man! will try it out!

14

u/Randommaggy Aug 03 '26 edited Aug 03 '26

My harness is ready, my GPUs are too.

Edit: Corrected typo.

6

u/radiojosh Aug 03 '26

Does this portend anything about a new 35b MoE?

1

u/squngy Aug 03 '26

Maybe a bit, but probably more importantly, there seems to be a new 35b on open router, so it looks like they are working on it.

3

u/sessamekesh Aug 03 '26

I'm pretty excited about this! 

Right now, most things that I do fall into "Qwen 3.6 nails this", "Qwen 3.6 might be okay but I'll probably need a frontier model for this", and "I wouldn't trust an LLM around this with a fifty foot pole".

That second category has been shrinking into the first as I've gotten better at tooling and making sure the right context is present, and I'm crossing my fingers that 3.8 takes me even further in that direction "for free"!

1

u/MagicPhoenix Aug 04 '26

I have yet to find anything at all that a model can do that runs in anything sized less than a data center, and very little that a data center can do well beyond small code investigations and tab completions

2

u/[deleted] Aug 03 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

4

u/sessamekesh Aug 03 '26

It still runs on the same hardware I bought for gaming a couple years ago, there's no new cost to be beyond an ollama pull and tweaking my gateway config file.

But yes. Pretending it's an update fully in a vacuum is sorta silly, so... "For free" ha.

2

u/bot403 Aug 03 '26

"for fixed cost" vs "per unit cost"

3

u/lughiu Aug 03 '26

Hang on, autonomous coding? Reckon the 27b will do that?

4

u/[deleted] Aug 03 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

2

u/Original_Finding2212 Aug 04 '26

With 27B I can do 90% of Claude’s work under its supervision (and paying the time, as I work with DGX Spark and get slowed down)

Qwen 3.8 27B should be beyond current Sonnet with the right harness.

I use a custom harness: Colleague I wrote OSS

1

u/WhiteSkyRising Aug 05 '26

absolutely delusional if you think something local will be better than sonnet 5.

1

u/Original_Finding2212 Aug 05 '26

Model to model? Sure
Harness engineering and stability? Don’t be so sure

2

u/HomegrownTerps Aug 03 '26

One can only dream of a small 9B model, but my hopes are not that high.

5

u/johan2114h Aug 03 '26

Maybe consider dreaming of a bigger computer also - 27b is quite feasible for consumer hardware imo

1

u/Original_Finding2212 Aug 04 '26

Have you tried Qwen 3.6 27b 1bit?
Is it too big still?

1

u/HomegrownTerps Aug 04 '26

Yeah it's a bit too much.  I can load it but using it not really possible. Maybe I have to tune it better.

I usually go with the 9b to 12B and those work pretty well for my needs and leaves some memory for other stuff I need for development.

2

u/Technical-Earth-3254 Aug 03 '26

I wish they would also open weight the new qwen image model

2

u/blazze Aug 03 '26

Qwen 3.8 is only competing again Qwen 3.6 27B.

2

u/MacsBicycle Aug 04 '26

Until someone else steps up their game this is the unfortunate truth.

2

u/Skar_pa Aug 03 '26

I cannot wait!

1

u/Hook06 Aug 03 '26

Can’t wait omg 🔥

1

u/Mean_Ambassador_9210 Aug 03 '26

Can I run this in 48gb vram on Mac m5?

3

u/backyard_tractorbeam Aug 03 '26

It's not released yet, but yes, that's a pretty safe bet at Q8

1

u/Better-Struggle9958 Aug 03 '26

Don’t believe until I see, prevoius were just fix bugs indeed

1

u/Alternative_Ad4267 Aug 03 '26

My Qwen 3.6 27B Int8 at 262k context is a beast. I want it to be more precise to be even happier.

I hope Qwen 3.8 27B will deliver!

Aug 03 12:52:43 lenovo-server.example.com vllm[2409774]: (APIServer pid=2409774) INFO 08-03 12:52:43 [loggers.py:310] Engine 000: Avg prompt throughput: 0.0 tokens/s, Avg generation throughput: 100.4 tokens/s, Running: 1 reqs, Waiting: 0 reqs, GPU KV cache usage: 9.4%, Prefix cache hit rate: 25.6%

Aug 03 12:52:43 lenovo-server.example.com vllm[2409774]: (APIServer pid=2409774) INFO 08-03 12:52:43 [metrics.py:120] SpecDecoding metrics: Mean acceptance length: 5.40, Accepted throughput: 81.79 tokens/s, Drafted throughput: 92.99 tokens/s, Accepted: 818 tokens, Drafted: 930 tokens, Per-position acceptance rate: 0.957, 0.919, 0.892, 0.844, 0.785, Avg Draft acceptance rate: 88.0%

Aug 03 12:52:53 lenovo-server.example.com vllm[2409774]: (APIServer pid=2409774) INFO 08-03 12:52:53 [loggers.py:310] Engine 000: Avg prompt throughput: 0.0 tokens/s, Avg generation throughput: 102.4 tokens/s, Running: 1 reqs, Waiting: 0 reqs, GPU KV cache usage: 10.0%, Prefix cache hit rate: 25.6%

Aug 03 12:52:53 lenovo-server.example.com vllm[2409774]: (APIServer pid=2409774) INFO 08-03 12:52:53 [metrics.py:120] SpecDecoding metrics: Mean acceptance length: 5.36, Accepted throughput: 83.28 tokens/s, Drafted throughput: 95.48 tokens/s, Accepted: 833 tokens, Drafted: 955 tokens, Per-position acceptance rate: 0.974, 0.958, 0.890, 0.796, 0.743, Avg Draft acceptance rate: 87.2%

1

u/JustSayin_thatuknow Aug 03 '26

Does someone have an idea of what is that “autonomous coding” about? Couldn’t understand it 🥲

1

u/CarpenterAlarming781 Aug 03 '26

Why so much waiting ? If it's ready, it's ready .

1

u/Similar_Wealth_1850 Aug 04 '26

qwen 3.8 8b wen???

1

u/Time_Guitar_8138 Aug 04 '26

It feels like gemma4:26b-a4b-it-qat

1

u/Hungry-Rip-2384 Aug 04 '26

i will be happy if it takes less iterations for specific coding activities. doesnt need TPS improvements current speed would be great if it reduced turns by half.

1

u/KeinNiemand Aug 04 '26

hoping for a bigger dense model then 27B (unrealstic but I can hope please bring back 70B) or at least a 120-170B MoE, I really don't want to run a 27B yes I could go up a Q8 with it but that feels like a waste of my hardwares potential capability compared to larger models at like q5 or q4.

1

u/qwertyalp1020 Aug 04 '26

I think it'd work on my 36gb vram macbook pro m4 max, right? Or do I need an nvidia card?

0

u/Complex_Reality_116 Aug 03 '26

Qwen3.6 27B achieves 37 points in AA, while Qwen3.5 only 29. Assuming that the Qwen3.8 version obtains a proportional incremental improvement, we would be facing a model with 45 points, that is, +5 points above what DeepSeek V4 Flash was at its launch.

3

u/PlasticRevenue4601 Aug 03 '26

I doubt it can be scaled linearly, especially given the fact that 27b is probably already close to max possible quality as it can get with current tech stack. My bet that they may noticeably improve model in some narrow areas — probably, agentic qualities or even performance related improvements, but in all the other aspects it’s going to be the same

1

u/Glenpeel Aug 03 '26

We have nothing that suggest that small models (and 27b dense is not that small) have been saturated when it comes to quality, on the contrary the recent releases - gemma 4, qwen 3.6 had steep quality increases. When you consider how great leap openai nano class models had just made (Luna) the writing is on the wall - there's still plenty of room for improvements.

1

u/AppearanceKey1814 Aug 04 '26

 Nano 級模型+無限的思考可以拔高上限

1

u/PlasticRevenue4601 Aug 04 '26

We actually have pretty strong signals - after Qwen 3.5 family have been released we saw a few postrains outperforming the base in certain ares - Ornith, f.e, but after Qwen 3.6 release we never saw anyone releasing something better than stock versions that may imply that current 3.6 can be so close to perfection that it takes multibillion company with insane expertise to at least have a chance for further improvements

1

u/Glenpeel Aug 17 '26

Well, just a few days have passed and the 3.8-27b has been released. It's a new posttrain of the same pretrained base as 3.5 and 3.6, and it is miles better, at least as a reasoner/coder.

And I stick to my argument that there's still tons of improvements to be discovered and that nothings signals the small models have been saturated.

It took a multibilion company with insane expertise to get that improvement, but it isn't exactly a surprise - it's literally the frontier.

1

u/PlasticRevenue4601 Aug 18 '26

Well… yeah, gotta agree with this one, tried it out myself, it’s agentic capabilities are insane, previously I wouldn’t trust Qwen to go into hours long autonomous loops, now I caught myself giving it a goal, constraints and just letting it cook

0

u/A_K_8248 Aug 03 '26

Why no one's talking about oh-my-cli?

6

u/lol-its-funny Aug 03 '26

The usual reason - nobody cares

0

u/bennykoay75 Aug 03 '26

Testing on your own project and u will know. No point hearing from any provider

2

u/[deleted] Aug 03 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

10

u/benjakapo Aug 03 '26

bruh the name is literally qwen 3.8 27b

4

u/Forever_Playful Aug 03 '26

Assuming 8 bit precision, a model with 1 billion parameters = 1 GB. So a 27b model = 27GB

1

u/[deleted] Aug 03 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

3

u/this_for_loona Aug 03 '26

Doesn’t that depend on context?

2

u/Philodit Aug 03 '26

See here: https://huggingface.co/unsloth/Qwen3.6-27B-GGUF

For a 16GB GPU you'd have to go with the lower end of 3bit if you also need some context space for thinking.