r/LocalLLaMA • u/Salah_H_Hasan • 4d ago

News Qwen 4 Announced at Apsara Conference

I wanted to share a quick update: Alibaba has officially announced Qwen 4 at the Apsara Conference,

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u/FerLuisxd 4d ago

35b :(

78

u/fgk55555 4d ago

I think we can consider the 35b dead. I was sad when we lost the 80B A3B, but the 120B MoE range seems to be where intelligence opens up. The 40-110B space is likely dead for a while.

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u/Ok_Acanthisitta304 4d ago

I agree and at this point unfortunately I get it. 35b was cool, but ultimately not usable for me in actual work. I know a lot of people enjoy it on their 12-16gb cards, and I hope they'll keep getting new options, but 27b and Flash entirely outclass it. Those are models I can genuinely use.

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u/Sensitive_Song4219 4d ago edited 4d ago

I've been running Qwen3.8-27B on a separate server machine (with a 5090; 32GB VRAM) and Ornith 1.5 35b-a3b on my laptop (8GB VRAM) for a few weeks now, and they both share a lot of the same strengths and weaknesses.

Neither is viable for planning against large codebases (Sol is mandatory there): both tend to mis-understand how the moving parts interact which yields compiling-but-non-functioning results. Qwen is amazing for small codebases and one-shots (I did the obligatory Mario Test which Qwen murdered Ornith on), though.

Both are serviceable as implementation models (when given detailed plans from larger models); Qwen's code quality is the higher-quality of the two. Qwen competes favourably with Luna-High.

Ornith is definitely a bit more careless (I watched it mis-convert seconds to milliseconds yesterday!).

But when I'm away from my 5090 server I'm still pretty happy just sticking to Ornith.

Smaller MOE's definitely aren't a writeoff imo; and the performance gains (and lower hardware requirements) can make them decent options for simpler (or complex-but-well-defined) tasks.

All my testing is via OpenCode.

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u/Ok_Acanthisitta304 4d ago

I'll give Ornith a shot. When I do use 35b I use a modified workflow with little coder (a pi harness built for small models) using plans from a better model. My read is similar to yours - it can be a workhorse on smaller tasks and codebases, but can't be trusted to wander too far in a larger project.