> Today, we are officially releasing Qwen 3.8-Max, the most capable model in the Qwen family to date. This also marks the first time we will open-source the weights of a Qwen-Max-class model — the open weights will be released next week.
> Qwen3.8 is launching and going open-weight soon! [...] You don't have to wait to test it. Just now, the Qwen3.8-Max-Preview made its debut on Alibaba’s Token Plan, Qoder, and QoderWork.
They've also announced Qwen3.8-27B being released open-weight next week. Qwen3.6-27B is widely regarded as one of the best local models, especially since nothing else comes close to it, that isn't benchmaxxed, without being significantly larger. If 3.8 truly improves upon it that would be awesome.
> In this case, Qwen3.8-Max was asked to create the oh-my-cli project from scratch and, over a 10+ day long-horizon autonomous coding run, build a self-evolving harness.
They don't explain how successful that went but it's a bit hilarious seen that an Anthropic dev explained that it's been 15 days Claude was hard at work --with nothing to show yet-- trying to rewrite itself in another language.
"You rewrite Claude Code, we rewrite oh-my-pi."
"You're nowhere after 15 days, we do it in 10."
Sure, it's apples to oranges and all that. But part of me thinks they know fully well what they did there.
I think the window for a ban of open weight models is closing fast so let's hope US administration is going to miss it and we get Fable-level models (at least in some aspects) with open weights without infringing any newly introduced law as a long-term local baseline.
I'm trying and failing to find value running a potential Qwen 3.8 27b dense model on a 16 core, 128 GB of ram, 2080ti box. Yes, the GPU yells for help, but the problem is that no math works to upgrade this machine even when pouring $200 in rent every month into the large model providers...
How are you all justifying economical use of these local models right now? What's the cost efficient way to do this and do better (even with models evolving over time and losing now vs later) than the big labs?
It was a matter of time for China to catch up with the US. In terms of infrastructure, manufacturing, and engineering workforce, China has the upperhand and I foresee them becoming the SOTA leaders. Maybe if the US wasn't so busy gatekeeping and keeping things proprietary, they would've had more trust from the open source community.
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[ 81.6 ms ] story [ 1556 ms ] threadSurely Alibaba is leading by example here by reducing work hours per week while keeping pay the same right? Right?
I don't understand. That's dated today, but:
https://twitter.com/alibaba_qwen/status/2078759124914098291
> Qwen3.8 is launching and going open-weight soon! [...] You don't have to wait to test it. Just now, the Qwen3.8-Max-Preview made its debut on Alibaba’s Token Plan, Qoder, and QoderWork.
That was on July 19th. I used it to draw this pelican: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/20/afraid-of-chinese-mode...
So what are they releasing today?
> Qwen3.8-Max comes with the official support for reasoning_effort, which can be used to adjust reasoning depth and control cost:
> xhigh (default): for complex tasks demanding thorough analysis
> medium: balancing accuracy and speed
> low: efficient reasoning optimizing for speed and cost
I hope this is significantly cheaper. I've been loving Deepseek for it's nearly free usage costs, hard to justify switching from cents per day.
Nice!
Does this mean they distilled Claude? Sounds like what Claude Code will often do.
They don't explain how successful that went but it's a bit hilarious seen that an Anthropic dev explained that it's been 15 days Claude was hard at work --with nothing to show yet-- trying to rewrite itself in another language.
"You rewrite Claude Code, we rewrite oh-my-pi."
"You're nowhere after 15 days, we do it in 10."
Sure, it's apples to oranges and all that. But part of me thinks they know fully well what they did there.
Just like we have professors with specialisation wondering if AI models can also be so.
How are you all justifying economical use of these local models right now? What's the cost efficient way to do this and do better (even with models evolving over time and losing now vs later) than the big labs?
i might end up cancelling claude, anybody else thinking of the same ?