I’m very curious if we’re going to ever get another “deepseek moment. Qwen is starting to feel like it could be one. But for it to be people would have to decide to care. It took about a month, I think mid December-mid January, from the deepseek paper for the “moment” so it doesn’t necessarily have to be right away.
Qwen 3.6 Plus is a decent model in our benchmarks (which found it to perform lower than its model card) at gertlabs.com, but not ground-breaking.
The reason for the insane popularity is because it's pretty good AND free. It's a no-brainer to switch to this for anything usage-based that isn't frontier coding while the free limits are available. It's probably running a model ~100B parameters under the hood, which won't be so heavily subsidized for long.
EDIT: our tool usage benchmark is still running, but so far, its performance with tools is dramatically better than its one shot performance. I'm treating Qwen 3.6 Plus as a near-SOTA model now.
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[ 0.21 ms ] story [ 24.2 ms ] threadThe reason for the insane popularity is because it's pretty good AND free. It's a no-brainer to switch to this for anything usage-based that isn't frontier coding while the free limits are available. It's probably running a model ~100B parameters under the hood, which won't be so heavily subsidized for long.
EDIT: our tool usage benchmark is still running, but so far, its performance with tools is dramatically better than its one shot performance. I'm treating Qwen 3.6 Plus as a near-SOTA model now.