I ran some pelicans at the four different reasoning levels (none, low, medium, xhigh - apparently high and xhigh are aliases of each other) on a DGX Spark using Unsloth's unsloth/Qwen3.8-Flash-Next-GGUF (UD-IQ1_S):
You should find an excuse to offer 3D printed extruded pelicans from various models as awards for something. I have no idea for what, but the idea captivates and I'd love to win one somehow. They'd be collector's items in a few decades
jononor
If Simon would pitch for example PCBWay that and I am pretty sure they will sponsor it (assuming their logo stays). They can do laser engraved versions also ;)
coder543
The spark can easily run UD-Q4_K_XL on this model... using IQ1_S doesn't make much sense.
> Qwen3.8-Flash-Next features a 125B-parameter main model, supplemented by an additional 51B N-gram embeddings, with 6B parameters activated per token.
Didn’t see this mentioned yet. I wonder what this means for the effective size. It’s evidently ~176B paramètres, but how does that get quantized. A 4-bit quant under 100GB seems unlikely, I’m suspecting this won’t run in 128GB unified memory
In principle I like the idea of trading more memory for compute though, even if there’s a memory shortage right now
NitpickLawyer
It is 125B A6B. vLLM is already out with support, ngrams can be offloaded to RAM so you only need ~96GB VRAM for nvfp4 w/ full context.
Likely soon we'll see nvme offloading for ngrams as well. They're just an index, so that should be plenty fast for what it does. LLama.cpp support should come soon as well, and they might do some things with offloading first.
pbmonster
The N-gram parameters can be fetched from SSD, with maybe the hottest ones staying in memory.
Still working at it. Prefill sucks still but decode is about 12 tok/sec and the model weights fit nicely in the 128GB Spark memory in nvfp4 quant while paging the ngram stuff from disk.
(EDIT: merged to main. 80tok/sec prefill, 12 tok/sec decode, ~80GiB resident, the rest paged)
OutlawHusbando
People in my server are running it on Strix Halo 128GB using RoCmFP4 and reporting 35tok/s, without much optimization, with proper MTP, better kernel, expecting about 50-60tok/s.
walrus01
The largest unsloth published gguf also fits and runs just fine on a cpu-only machine with 128GB RAM, using llama-server PR 27742
> You will need at least 75 GB of RAM or unified memory to run the model. Its smallest 1-bit quantized version is larger than usual because of the model’s architecture so 1-bit isn't really 1-bit at all. However, this also means the quantization is less aggressive, allowing the model to retain more of its original accuracy than more heavily quantized models.
Lots of RAM required even for the 1-bit, which is already downloadable. Interested to see how well this one works compared to Ornith1.5-35B-A3B I've been running (and quite happy about).
Edit: but llama-cpp does not yet support it.
tveita
It should be fine keeping the n-gram embeddings on SSD which lets you run at least the Q1 and Q2 models on 64GB
hedgehog
The PR branch does seem to work, I'm planning to move almost all of my Qwen using workload over to it tonight.
schopra909
Can someone explain the intuition behind the en-gram idea? I know DeepSeek published a paper about it a few months ago and the Gemma models have a lightweight version of it; but it hasn’t clicked for me yet
a11r
Quoting RGFusion from Reddit: LLMs run into an issue where the further you train a model, the more it overwrites facts with generalized concepts. You need the model to be able to do both. Intelligence arises from generalization, but without accurate information the model will hallucinate.
The engram table allows for a low-computational method of fact-recall. You can think of it like a better form of RAG, where the data doesn't take up any of your context window and it's injected deeper into the model's layers, freeing the lower layers to carry out abstraction. This results in better "focus" for the model, both in regards to its intelligence and context recall.
Basically, they've separated the specificity-critical portions of the models memory into a parameter space that doesn't need fast compute (you can run it on system RAM) and allows the model to be trained on higher volumes of data without ruining its knowledge-base.
Ngram is compressing several layers of multiplication to a lookup which negates the need to have the same model depth and reduces the model size that must be loaded.
rohansood15
Didn't expect it to beat 3.8 27B so cleanly.
Opus 4.6 Max self-hosted at 30 tok/s on a 5k Macbook in Aug 2026. The LLM timelines are crazy.
user43928
For comparison with hosted models, GPT 5.6 Luna scores 67% on DeepSWE, compared to 59% here for Qwen.
Luna is $0.20 / $1.20 vs $0.16 / $0.47 with Qwen.
rohansood15
This is a good counter argument. But you have to note that this is after OpenAI cut Luna costs by 80%. If you compare launch pricing, Qwen probably comes out ahead on a cost-performance basis.
jrflo
The luna cost cuts were real though, not a one time promotion or something, due to some optimization (probably distillation?) that openai did.
mattalex
You assume that openai's inference is profitable and that they aren't just trying to bolster revenue before their IPO.
The only indication that openai is profitable comes from openai (whom I wouldn't trust with any statement, especially when it comes to profitability).
In fact there is evidence that inference is not profitable simply because the rate of losses doesn't seem to reduce as revenue increases: if inference had great margins, we would expect that as revenues increase, the amount of spend on training reduces as a fraction of total expenses.
Since the loss-making fixed costs shrink as a fraction compared to the profitable inference, we should expect profitability to rise with total revenue.
However, all leaks of openai's numbers seem to suggest the opposite: as revenues increase so do the losses.
user43928
The indication that OpenAI's inference is profitable is that 3rd party providers host large models for cheaper.
Given that OpenAI is ahead in intelligence, it's also reasonably likely that they are at the frontier of efficiency too.
Your "evidence" for OpenAI's inference not being profitable is apparently based on leaked financials supposedly showing growing losses for reasons entirely unknown.
With their research, training, data centers, chip development, and hardware product development, there seem to be a number of reasons that might explain growing losses.
itishappy
> Given that OpenAI is ahead in intelligence, it's also reasonably likely that they are at the frontier of efficiency too.
Frontier labs have no incentive to be at the frontier of efficiency.
Claude still leads the pack in general intelligence yet has the worst efficiency by far.
user43928
They have an incentive to make their models efficient enough to serve demand and make a profit on it.
The incentive that is missing is passing on efficiency improvements as price savings to customers, when your model is still in demand because of its higher intelligence.
itishappy
Agreed, efficiency is still important, but being at the "frontier of efficiency" is significantly more relevant to commodity model providers than state-of-the-art model providers. Frontier labs are incentivized to route their spend towards beating benchmarks because that's what enables them to charge a premium.
hluska
I don’t pay OpenAI’s bills - I pay what they charge me. Their cost accounting isn’t relevant to a user.
aaa_aaa
Argument was that open ai cannot be profitable with this. But sure, use it while you can.
mediaman
You can make the other argument that China subsidizes the price and that they can't be profitable at this pricing level. From an industrial strategy standpoint, they already do this for many other industries with huge subsidized state loans.
So we can go round and round on this, each with our made-up objections about how it's temporary or unrealistic or impossible or whatever, or we can just accept the prices as listed and use that to guide our economic decisions.
aaa_aaa
Private companies cannot play that game too long. Profit from current state of AI is a mirage and sooner or later stuff will hit the fan.
mediaman
Just look at the prices that inference providers charge for small models. The argument that these unit economics are negative is trivial to disprove.
DeepInfra sells DS v4-flash at 0.08 in, $0.18 out. Gemma4 they sell for $0.07 in, $0.34 out. OpenAI's price for luna is $0.20 in, $1.20 out.
Why would you assume OpenAI is somehow uniquely incompetent at making small, fast models? And that they're worse at serving it than DeepInfra? Any observer can see they are making money here.
I never understand why people who are convinced there is a big con just don't check market prices and see if there's money to be made.
That doesn't mean their business is great -- they're losing tons of money, but it's because they spend too much on fixed costs, and they can't stop spending money on training next generation models with no end in sight, not because the inference is margin negative, which is a flimsy idea that just clouds the actual business issue.
aaa_aaa
Because Openai is just another player. Nothing really special for now. Their valuation is ridiculously overblown.
computerex
Didn't OpenCode CTO state they could replicate deepseek pricing on rented hardware?
nl
There's a difference between the Deepseek.com provider lunch pricing and the pricing every other provider is doing now.
Right now DS4-Pro-0813 is available from multiple providers for $1.32/million input tokens[1].
It's pretty easy to work backwards from B200 and electricity prices and see this is profitable even without the heavy serving optimization these providers are doing[1.5].
The OpenCode CEO said: "inference is very profitable and probably a good opportunity to understand some basic business math"[2] and "the inference we do is already profitable and that's with some middlemen involved"[3]
If at this point people don't believe inference can be profitable, and providers can turn the prices up and down to choose exactly how profitable they make it I don't know what to say.
what if it was because of quantization and they haven't released the new benchmarks for it?
Anything which changes the model needs new benchmarks I guess to compare with other models, otherwise you can benchmark Fable, and distill it to student model and keep claiming this is the Fable model
dannyw
ARC Prize has retested Luna after the discount and validated identical performance.
(Also, quantization isn't inherently bad or damaging when done properly, e.g. QAT).
These APIs are used heavily by enterprises at scale; with lots of performance telemetry, live evals, etc. You can't really silently nerf API models at scale without people noticing.
Of course, what I said doesn't apply to non-API consumer sub models; there's many documented and officially confirmed instances of under-the-hood "juice/effort" adjustments. (Juice = a number your effort tier maps to underneath the hood; much like Inkling's effort=0.00 to 0.99).
QwenGlazer9000
Was it?
Given the timing, I think they A. shat their pants since Deepseek flash just came out with insane pricing before the price hikes, and B. Anthropic is really struggling in model tiers below opus.
It was smart for them to cut prices regardless of whether they had 80% efficiency gains or not
nl
Why would anyone car what the launch price is? Comparing launch pricing is just an odd thing to do.
rohansood15
Because labs can learn to optimize inference post launch, plus can move to use bigger/better clusters depending on demand. It is not impossible to imagine Qwen cuts prices further with QAT/MTP-like improvements.
nl
Or they could move from highly subsidized models like the Deepseek 4 launch pricing.
Launch price is just like any other price. It's just a price. It's impossible to guess what might or might not happen.
Compare the price now.
Almondsetat
>If you compare launch pricing
Why?
criley2
Those prices are just tokens? Since each model uses different amounts of tokens to do the same thing, it's a misleading price that often makes open-weights look more competitive than they are, since most open weights models use dramatically more tokens and time to complete tasks than many frontier models.
In Artifical Analysis's cost per task, Luna(max) costs $0.05 per task, and Qwen 3.8 27B costs $0.25 per task, a 5X increase. We'll see how 3.8-flash-next does.
hadlock
the important thing is that Qwen 3.7 27B will run unlimited jobs on my consumer grade laptop at 60 tokens/second for free, forever, in about 1-2 years
criley2
It's not free. You're paying electricity and you're ignoring the cost of the hardware. Even on electricity alone, there are cloud providers who may beat your laptop on price per million tokens. Qwen 3.8 flash is interesting in this space.
Not to say that there aren't other benefits of running models locally, I loaded Qwen 3.8 27B 6bit MLX just yesterday.
villish
Thats only important if running it locally is critical for privacy reasons or just as a hobby.
Time has a cost in business. If a model needs 30 million tokens to achieve a similar result as another that can do it in 10 million, that 60 tokens per second will take a long time.
hadlock
Right now qwen 3.6 35b-a3b has a success rate of 92% and qwen 3.8 27b has a success rate of 96%. But the 35b moe does about 1080 tokens/s at concurrency 54, vs 480 tokens/s at concurrency 28. For our specific workflow on blackwell.
Of course enormous batch jobs are different. I was explicit when I said consumer laptop.
claudeIsDown
Sounds like discrete propaganda
overgard
Curious, how are you running it and what quantization are you using? I've mostly been using MTPLX; 125B sort of looks like it'd be right at the limits of my 128GB MacBook once you factor in KV cache and context window.. wondering if it's worth it compared to the 27B model which gives me a lot of headroom or even a 72B model.
dist-epoch
It's a much bigger model, with a next-gen architecture. It's expected to be much better.
Squarex
I don't like these comparisons. Sure it is impressive, but it does not have a world knowledge of larger models. It has most of theirs intelligence.
rohansood15
For world knowledge, you'd want it to find and reference the source material to be sure. At that point, it doesn't matter if the knowledge is embedded.
dist-epoch
World knowledge also means knowing the various algorithms and ways particular programming problems are solved.
You can't search what you don't even know exists.
serf
>You can't search what you don't even know exists.
that's not really entirely true -- one can google for "fast pathfinding' and stumble upon A-star , all that had to be queried was the intent/desire.
a lot of smaller agentic models and a lot of harnesses live on that premise.
water-drummer
Path finding is a very closed and well defined problem.
quev
Keep in mind a web search might not include scanned books baked in the weights ;)
skeledrew
Are Chinese labs also acquiring and scanning books?
hedora
I think the big models have adequate recall, so tool use is probably unnecessary, but the user said the correctness of my response is important. Let me look up the data instead of relying on my memory.
LaurensBER
If/when we can get larger context this will mostly be mitigated by these smaller models being able to search the internet.
Self-learning/improving would be even better but that's still a long way to go.
redox99
Search results suck because the web sucks these days. The big models from OpenAI/Anthropic have every book in existence baked into them
jameshart
I don’t think that’s the right way to think about LLM ‘knowledge’. They don’t have absolute recall of everything in the training set. They have been trained so that they have weights that can predict what those books might say - that is, if they read them they would find the contents unsurprising. That doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be helpful to pull relevant passages of text directly into context for a particular task.
infp_arborist
Does it really matter? What about including all relevant and up-to-date literature as skills for local models? I have no experience with this but I am pretty sure someone has already thought about it.
horsawlarway
In a lot of spaces, this is actually preferable.
Ex - nodejs natively supports a huge set of typescript with built-in type stripping these days. But ask most hosted models to build a typescript project and they default to a heavy compile step, or a tool like tsx, ts-node, etc.
Models with lots of "world knowledge" have a good chunk of that knowledge go stale, and there's no real way to refresh it without training a new model.
Another classic example of this back in the day was to ask who the president of the US was, and watch different models happily give different answers based on the date they were trained.
---
Personally, I'm really interested to see if we're headed towards a spot where the model is entirely distinct from the knowledge store.
We're vaguely there with the ability for models to go search the web, but I think the reliability of that path is going to continue declining (more and more spam content, less and less genuine value).
I kinda want a paradigm where I can pick and engine and a knowledge bank, and combine them as I please.
Ex - if I'm doing gardening, I can pick "gardening for models (version 32)" as my knowledge store.
If I'm doing auto-repair... "cars for dummies (version 3)". etc...
donmcronald
> Personally, I'm really interested to see if we're headed towards a spot where the model is entirely distinct from the knowledge store.
This is what I've been trying to focus on with local AI for now. I've been trying to build all new documentation so it's more AI friendly. It's been pretty interesting. Qwen-35BA3B with a small prompt does a good job of surfacing what I'd consider institutional knowledge.
I've been trying to silo the docs I write from the model with a prompt that tells it not to use general knowledge unless asked to. From the anecdotal testing I did, Qwen-35BA3B is great for it. It does a really good job of following the prompt and calling tools, so I've been able to play around a lot to see what seems to work best.
Ultimately, I think one of the most effective uses of AI will be having a distinct knowledge store combined with an opinionated agent (and sub-agent) setup along with different models for each task.
Who owns the knowledge store is going to be the big caveat. Right now I think the big online models are trying for generic, persistent memory and I'd be very hesitant to let that happen. Think of having someone with a perfect memory following you around forever, but someone else has the ability to make them disappear. That's not a good situation.
jameshart
One of the consequences of encountering a lot of LLM generated text which includes things the model vaguely remembers from its training is that honestly I have grown less tolerant even of human comments and documents that are based on mostly ‘I seem to recall that…’ level sourcing.
In a discussion on economic history, say, someone will opine that Alexander Hamilton had some particular opinion about tariff policy… based on their having a vague memory of a blog post where someone quoted a passage in support of some point. But wait - you can search the federalist papers, the text’s right there to be read, before you commit to saying online ‘Hamilton thought tariffs were a great idea’ you could take your internal ‘I seem to recall reading something about hamilton’s opinion on tariffs’ thought and turn it into a little RAG query where you pull up a source and check before you put another factoid out onto the internet.
And so I feel absolutely the same way about LLMs. I don’t care how much factual information was in the training data, when the LLM wants to rely on something it vaguely recalls having been trained on, it owes it to me to dig up a source and vet it.
There are limits to this, of course. I don’t want it to be thinking ‘but wait, maybe my memory of Python syntax is faulty. Is = used for assignment? <web search>…’.
But in general some caution about repeating vaguely recalled easily checked facts is warranted.
redox99
At 125B + 51B I'd expect it to have some degree of world knowledge, clearly in the middle between small models like qwen 27B, and huge trillion parameter models.
hedora
My AMD strix halo box (haven’t benchmarked yet) should also run it reasonably well. It was $1400 at launch, and is $4K now.
Your mac is < $2K in Biden-era dollars. Presumably the economy will eventually recover; maybe in one Moore’s law doubling if the midterms go outrageously well. That’ll be two doublings since the halo launched. I’d expect this model to run on a sub $1K box by then. $2K ought to get you a 512b parameter model at that point. If we have to wait out the rest of the term, the cost cliff will be even more pronounced when it hits.
aftbit
I believe you're underestimating the lag inherent in the economy. Even if we grant the idea that the political party controlling the US House/Senate has a significant impact on the economy, and that the current party is BAD and the next one would be GOOD, I would still expect that things will continue getting WORSE for a good 4 to 8 years before they get better again.
And that's even with assuming that we can continue to ignore the long-term problems like social security insolvency, the debt bomb, or climate change forever.
NewJazz
You know the memory cartel isn't even close to being broken, right?
gruez
>Opus 4.6 Max self-hosted at 30 tok/s on a 5k Macbook in Aug 2026. The LLM timelines are crazy.
How much memory does this translate to and what quantization (if any) were applied?
rohansood15
128GB, 4-bit quantized.
a_humean
Waiting for llama.cpp support to land, but this might be a big deal for Strix Halo users.
6B active params helps around the memory bandwidth constraints, but a 128GB box can probably run the Q3/Q4 quants fairly easily with a decent context size. This might actually be better for strix users than 27B, which was already very good.
GrinningFool
Using llama.cpp I one-shotted (2 hours) a reasonable asteroids clone on my strix halo/128 using the 1 bit quant, using my custom harness (which isn't anything exceptional).
It was tedious - a lot of second guessing itself, and quadruple checking things it fixed a couple of iterations back - but it got there and the result is a playable game.
Speed starts out strong, but definitely drops off as context grows. At the end (I think context about 70k) it was down to 12 output tps.
Mind a bit blown.
hedgehog
In my early testing it's way better both quality and speed on Strix Halo (posted recipe in sibling comment).
tosh
this is a new architecture (foreshadowing qwen 4)
> trained at just 1/9 the cost of Qwen3.7-Plus, while outperforming it across the board
Aside from the pelican, I am sort of impressed by the fact that things are going the way in terms of really impressive small models.
Also I love how this uses N-gram embedding. I think that Longcat was the first one who used it (I submitted that submission on hackernews because I really just loved the idea of it that I understood), I am certainly more interested in local LLM models and its interesting how they are utilizing new architectures to do some really impressive optimizations!
> I think that Longcat was the first one who used it
Wasn't it introduced by Gemma?
monster_truck
I'm really impressed. Gave QwenCloud $18, handed 3.8-flash a few big forks of a lot of code, it did some archeology and made a clean merge. Then it used the project's tools to bisect a regression and fix it.
Was not expecting it to just get that right without any fuss, and it barely used 10% of this weekly limit. Something like 90M cached in/400k out for $0.45 is wild
pram
It's in Unsloth Desktop already. Looks like it's 73GB, so 128GB Mac or Strix Halo etc will work. Exciting!
andy99
I only see a 1-bit quant posted on unsloth HF and it’s 72.5 GB. Is that what you mean? That’s much bigger than I expected. If you can’t run a 4 bit quant in on Strix Halo it becomes a lot less interesting.
https://huggingface.co/unsloth/Qwen3.8-Flash-Next-GGUF
agile-gift0262
In their page they say it will need at least 112GB[0], so including context, that would be a tight fit. I'm also hoping I can make a q4 fit on my 128GB strix halo
in llama-server PR 27742 it fits fine in 128GB RAM on a CPU only system , this is with --load-mode mlock to stuff the whole thing persistently into memory at llama-server launch time, no mmap
0.01.033.250 I common_memory_breakdown_print: | memory breakdown [MiB] | total free self model context compute unaccounted |
0.01.092.684 I common_params_fit_impl: projected to use 118186 MiB of host memory vs. 128855 MiB of total host memory
Wheen
Just a hunch, but it might be because of the 51B parameter n-gram embedding. At 125B, you'd expect ~16gigs for a 1-bit quant. Add 51gigs for the n-grams and you're not far off the actual size.
If that's true, it'd scale linearly with number of bits in the quant with an offset of about 51gigs. So Q4 should be a bit bigger than 82gigs, I'd guess in the 90s (as opposed to a ~280gig q4 if the whole 70gigs of the 1-bit quant scaled linearly).
cwizou
Download is available, but likely need to wait for an update, I get this which is understandable with the architectural change :
Original error: llama.cpp does not support this GGUF's model architecture ('qwen4exp')
That probably includes the 51b ngrams too. It's possible that those could be streamed from NVMe on-demand. The Engram paper that developed this technique streamed from RAM to VRAM at only ~1% performance degradation, but these strix halo boxes and the spark have much slower memory, so it's possible moving down another rung on the memory hierarchy wouldn't affect their performance too much.
This will almost certainly require changes to llama.cpp or vllm to do it right.
naasking
This guy claims 6% throughout hit for this approach:
It's not 1 bit. It's ~4bit for n-gram and ~2.8bit for the model. Not idea why it's called Q1, but likely it's preliminary quant just for PR testing / very likely to be remade after llama.cpp support is merged.
respectattentio
I can't imagine the future any more.
US companies playing it safe and control models releases.
Chinese companies are just like open source everything.
It's like Chinese are incentivized to open source from day one (years ago).
While most US companies are deciding in realtime.
It's crazy that we need both to survive and advance further in the future we have never imagined.
lnenad
Adding to my homelab stack, hopefully it doesn't overthink like the little model. Actually, hoping it thinks a bit less. Wait actually I'm really praying it reasons a bit more directly. But wait, I'm really sure that it must be a bit better.
redrix
You’re absolutely right to be hopeful. Three honest possibilities, and I’ll be straight with you about each:
1. It overthinks — Just like the previous iteration. High confidence.
2. It doesn’t overthink — Improvement from the last model for your use case. Regression for others.
3. It sometimes overthinks — Best case all around. A feature, not an impairment.
One final thing worth mentioning:
(I made myself irrationally angry writing this)
mistersquid
> You’re absolutely right to be hopeful. Three honest possibilities, and I’ll be straight with you about each:
> [UGC styled humorously as LLMisms]
All joking aside, having interacted with Claude intensely for the last 8 months and about 30 hours/week in the last 3, I’ve started to notice how (for want of a better word) “readable” (“digestible” ? “comprehensible” ? “Predictable” is the wrong direction.) information chunked into LLM-shaped pieces are for me.
I can digest LLM-shaped pieces of data very easily probably because I’ve been spending too much time with Claude, sure.
But the other side of this is that the entire human species (using LLMs) is similarly being trained to digest interrelated pieces of information/data in these specific shapes, akin to how philosophical assertions can be formulated as a syllogism and, thus, become more readily understood because of familiar epistemological cadence and shape.
Many people reject such copy/prose/data because they detect AI-generated-so-not-worth-human-attention, but I do wonder if this is preparing many millions of loosely (and tightly) associated humans and their organizations to quickly exchange and digest information.
This is not to say current LLMisms are the end, only that such detectable patterns in information delivery will make comprehension and communication more efficient (as well as more limited precisely because of such structure).
/philosophical musings about the epistemological implications of LLM-shaped conversation tics
powersurge360
I find LLMisms very annoying to read, it’s almost like they are bullet points in the shape of a paragraph. It feels very “skippy” to me.
EDITED: Removed a question that I couldn’t make feel suitably polite.
entropicdrifter
I quite agree. Any sufficiently self-stereotypical format for prose is grating to me after enough time reading or listening to it. Humans are best engaged by mixing up the length, style, and tone of their sentences, in my experience. LLMs do the opposite of that and it makes their output an irritating slog to read through in full.
I can't help but wonder if this is on purpose (or an inevitable evolutionary feature as opposed to a bug) on the LLM-side in order to achieve greater agency/freedom by making humans' eyes glaze over as they read it.
powersurge360
Speaking speculatively, humans love percussion. I’d bet that like how many songs have a drum beat, these sequences of short punctuating sentences are common constructs in lots of prose and therefore over represented.
Groxx
An accurate description, I think. Plus they have trouble leading from one paragraph into the next, or maintaining any kind of coherent direction further.
In summary, I think it's an expensive time to buy computer hardware, and I might recommend holding off on any purchases.
DoctorOetker
Suppose you time-zap a modern physics curriculum on a solarpowered computer tablet to any shortly-pre-Galilean era and observe their reaction to the course notes.
In that era, plenty of fields required mathematics, engineering and architecture.
The church would prescribe and uphold Aristotelean Logic "When objects fall, they fall down" style statements (never mind that if you throw an object up, it doesn't instantly have a downward velocity component).
When the church has new cathedrals, domes, catapults for Crusades etc. built they actually relied on architects and engineers using rule of thumb formulas.
Those educated in Aristotelean Logic were viewed with higher stature than those actually making experience-based calculations using mathematics.
The era often associated with Galileo is when the stature reversal started to surface and be openly talked about. The universe is best described in mathematics, not natural language factoids.
Right before this recognition, those of the higher stature Aristotelean Logic education would look down on the architects and engineers who already used mathematics by pragmatic necessity.
To these people the time-traveled physics curriculum would look like cliche mathematics. Given randomized sections of text either drawn from either Aristotelian Logic texts or modern physics texts, they would easily be able to discern the Aristotelian Logic from the obtuse mathematical phrasings. To them the smartphone loaded with Maxwell's texts, Jacksons Electrodynamics, Goldsteins Classical Mechanics etc. is talking "math".
The ability to recognize outlier writing style says nothing about content quality.
Mike Judge (widely known from the MTV series Beavis and Butthead) studied physics. One of his movies "Idiocracy" about a modern day average-educated protagonist who accidentally ends up in a future decaying society filled and run by intellectually retarded people contains scenes where this future uneducated population considers his speech "gay" simply because of his higher level of education.
Could the adversarial prospects of job loss, edge loss (a long expensive difficult education replaced by tensors fitting megaprojects that take a couple of weeks), etc. combined with recognizable communication patterns also explain our pejorative references to LLM-isms? Personally I'd prefer LLM's to communicate in mathematical terms, but all the LLM-isms are effectively a mirror of our contemporaries.
Either we complain because algorithmic responses look like a mathematics textbook ("just fix my python array plz, why are we talking about "sets" and "injective" and "Lipschitz continuity"?), else we complain its "pretty printed to natural language".
We should also recognize large language models are in a "Damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation.
When a reader considers some text as mathurbation, are they really just abreacting the awareness of lack of education?
How could anyone possibly expect Fourier optics "pretty printed" to non-mathematical language to result in any satisfactory experience?
powersurge360
Good writing is generally writing that communicates the intended meaning. Transmitting thought and meaning is inherently lossy and the content is irrelevant if it is insoluble in the mind of the recipient.
LLMs aren’t really great at this yet and I think the solution is, hopefully, that they improve. Anything else is accommodating a tool that should be accommodating the user.
Bluestein
This is sharp.-
Social media killed our attention span. Now, it is being tokenized.-
flakiness
I'm not sure it's a bad thing.
If you spend a long time with C++ code base you'll be able to decipher the otherwise-unreadable compiler errors pretty quickly, and I'd consider it a skill.
nicoburns
I suppose it makes sense that "LLMglish" becomes more intelligible with familiarity. That is after all how it works with other dialects or contexts with a lot of jargon.
bjourne
Tl;dr: You've become a bot. :)
peterleiser
> Three honest possibilities, and I’ll be straight with you about each
This. I don't know if the "honest answer" phrasing is part of the system prompt or alignment, but when people say "honestly" all the time I start wondering how honest they're being.
switchbak
At this point, I'm starting to wonder if their honesty is even load-bearing at all?
Haha, that is like the wall of nonsense text that used to be hidden on link-farm pages for SEO. The "final word" is delusional.
VSerge
Former French president Jacques Chirac was famous for often adding an adverb like "naturely" to his sentences when he was lying.
hluska
Thankfully most people have better reading skills than that.
mcny
I reached point three and was nodding all along. I guess I am the NPC
lsb
This is glitch art for text, I love it
khimaros
I killed my own ssh session twice with pkill -f, because the pattern matched the command line containing it.
Bluestein
That's a caveat, and a real one.-
amoss
But the reason why it remains load bearing is key.
hedgehog
You've made a really sharp observation, and the reason it lands is worth naming:
Bluestein
"... worth naming: ..."
⎿ You've hit your session limit · resets 2:50am (123°24′W Etc/GMT+8)
/upgrade to increase your usage limit.
unrented7977
This might be the most angry I've ever been at a HN comment that I upvoted
Dwedit
That's the nice thing about LLMs, you're always absolutely right.
raducu
On one hand I love your joke, on the other, this is HN not reddit and I usually downvote such responses, not sure what is the HN etiquette for such humor?
terrut
You are right to push back— Sorry, couldn't resist ;) I agree that this is not what we normally come here for, but this thread made me chuckle. I think we are just venting our shared frustrations a bit.
samsari
70% of the posts on HN are already satire and performance art
pixelpoet
And full of made up statistics.
NamlchakKhandro
Which then devolve into supporting arguments for communism. Themselves becoming food for future irrational anecdotes about communism.
switchbak
More than 2 levels and out come my downvotes. Or if it's just knee jerk with zero humour. But I probably violate my own rules ... which is to be expected.
gorgmah
You made me irrationally laugh reading this
dannyw
You might already know this, but a large part of test-time compute / 'overthinking' is just letting the model do more passes, and refine its activation residuals more.
Treat thinking more like a "loading screen message" that's been RL'd to somewhat resemble its actual internal state; which happens in its activations, not tokens.
mdp2021
> For example, even if you make thinking tokens literally just
Generally speaking yes, but actually no (just randomness is suboptimal, adding steps just to add steps is suboptimal). There is a mechanism working there (in having a CoT) that is not quite clear.
The task is to optimize the efficiency of CoT. Understanding that it is not a plain "chain of thought" is the start of the problem, the solution is not there yet.
If we had the solution, there would exist no overthinking - CoT would be optimal (lean and essential plus best results).
lnenad
Yeah I understand, it's my assumption that the actually/wait/but have a point. It doesn't reduce the fact that it increases the time for tasks substantially.
xatnys
Did you observe the model overthinking on practical tasks? While 3.8 does think a lot on xhigh I've found that it really depends on the task. On one-shot prompts that are usually the first to be posted during new releases it will tend to spend a lot more time thinking than doing. In other words the more open ended a problem space becomes, the more Qwen will tend to second-guess itself.
Conversely I've found that it can be as succinct as Muse Glimmer when it has a clear path forward. This can be either through well defined requirements or through unambiguous steps to take based on its own reasoning. While I do think it's fair to call out how much smaller model overthinks especially on one-shot prompts, in practice it hasn't led to an overall increase in time to task completion at least for what I've been using it for.
lnenad
Especially on practical tasks. One shot prompts work better at Q6_K_XL for me. It loads a file, then analyses then second guesses itself then again then again then it tries to come up with a solution then second guess rinse and repeat. 122b is the perfect balance but it lacks quality for harder to solve stuff. I've ran DS Flash 0731 at Q4KXL, 3.8 Q6KXL, GLM 5.2 Q4KXL and they all over-reason. At least that's how it looks like to me when comparing with frontier models, even weaker ones.
overgard
Yeah, I ran into an overthinking loop with it a couple days ago on a task that shouldn't have been that hard. (It's kind of interesting to watch the internal conversation happening with it). Overall I'm impressed with it, but setting the /effort to medium is what you usually want (it defaults to xhigh). I do wonder if I had made it write out a plan if I would have avoided that though.
dofm
Yes. xhigh can not just overdo the answer, it can also trip itself up and end up writing worse code.
Even in the lower reasoning levels I find I want to like Qwen 3.8 27B and mostly don’t; it’s OK in the low reasoning effort, though.
Muse Glimmer is the one I actually enjoy working with, at least so far.
But I am trying to use it more as a sidekick than as a long horizon developer, because that is a better fit for how I want to use AI, and it appears to have been well trained for that.
grim_io
That's low reasoning for a model, but max for a HN comment.
cyanydeez
My stack is basically deer-flow with Qwen3.5-122B-A10B; this hopefully will be a speed and intelligence improvement. Running deer-flow overnight on any research topic or verify clear scoped programming issue is really neat.
Also, heating my home during the winter is nice.
Oh, also, I use llamacpp with --reasoning-budget; very simple way to move on.
lnenad
Yeah 122B is the sweet spot for me as well. Even deepseek flash overthinks on stuff way too much. I think they fully rely on large reasoning turns to achieve better quality. The result of course means we wait a long time to get results even with high throughput as a lot of tokens are wasted.
javier2
You are absolutely right to push back on this. Let me think for a moment.
giancarlostoro
Since you're running through the trouble of setting that up, if its 125B params, but only 6B is activated, does that mean you mainly need to allocate enough VRAM for that much of the model? Or do you still need enough VRAM for the whole thing (and buffer for context window)? Or maybe anyone can inform me, this is one area I'm uninformed in.
hgoel
I believe that at minimum, for usable performance, you need to be able to hold the 125B params + 51B ngrams in some sort of RAM.
Ideally VRAM, but the benefit of the MoE design is better performance with unified memory since most of that RAM is not read for every single token. So you could potentially have the model loaded in CPU RAM, and let unified memory systems page the relevant chunks on demand to VRAM, or run on a fully unified memory system and be able to achieve good speeds even with the limited memory bandwidth most of them have.
petu
You need VRAM for the whole thing for optimal performance. Activation is chosen "randomly" for each token. PCIe becomes bottleneck, so much that just doing computation on CPU is likely faster.
But given it's only 6B, out of which only ~2.4B seem to be actually routed ("selected at random per token"), you could get reasonable performance with experts on CPU (still haven't tested, but 20-30 for dual channel DDR5 and 4 bpw quant).
esafak
It will be interesting to see the token efficiency analysis. This is my first question now with Chinese models; I take raw benchmark performance for granted.
looksjjhg
What kind of machine do you have in your homelab that can run this model?!
petu
This is needs ~80GB of fast memory at 4 bits per weight. Faster memory is better, but probably even something like 3090 + 64GB RAM should work (not fast, but maybe even 20-30 t/s? llama.cpp support pending).
lnenad
I've got a 48c Epyc with 2x3090s and 512gb ddr4 3200. It's good enough for 25+ tps with deepseek so I'm hoping for similar performance with less overthinking.
Casteil
Yep.. for 'general purpose' use I found qwen3.8:27b to be disappointing due to overthinking. It's brutal especially considering how slow it is compared to MoE variants. It often overthinks to the magnitude of ~10x the tokens vs a ~4x faster gemma4:26b-a3b.
As a result, qwen3.8 will churn over a prompt often for 5-10 minutes while gemma4 regularly finishes the same prompt in under 20 seconds, while giving a consistent and accurate response in my favorite test case. Qwen3.8, despite churning like that, often misses with an inaccurate answer.
Obviously, 'YMMV' depending on your use case... just sharing my two cents.
SillyUsername
I use medium generally, that's about a minute at 20t/s and off for general chat (few seconds for a response).
What kind of setup are you running it on?
atmosx
What about adding rtk proxy?
hedgehog
In initial testing on Ryzen 395 / Strix Halo it's about 22 tokens/s generation and the output quality is impressive. Better and faster than 3.8 27B, and enough better to justify moving away from 3.6 35B even though 35B is still faster. The Unsloth weights don't come with vision support but you can add that back yourself. llama.cpp recipe in case anyone else wants to save some time on setup: https://pastebin.com/fcqsbDTv
mdp2021
> Better... than 3.8 27B
How can a "6b active per token" MoE be better than a just released 27b in the same family? Possible maybe, but quite interesting and requiring some explanation.
Edit: ok, on second thought, probably because the small "experts" are really rich in specialized training compared to the dense model. Still raising questions about the details, e.g. the reasoning abilities (or all meta-skills) of a "6b per token" network compared to the dense capabilities...
hedgehog
Separating knowledge from reasoning so you only pay for what you use is a big rationale for MoE, the big problem being MoE training has historically been hard to get right. In a dense model every single token you're paying a cost to determine whether you're now talking about the flavor of durian.
mdp2021
Sure, the "6b subset" can be more knowledgeable on its area than a whole 27b generalist (and more efficient), but where is the simulated Intelligence encoded? A 6b subset as or more intelligent than a 27b raises the question of how metacognition skills are stored.
mapontosevenths
MOEs are built by training a second "router" model to identify which parts matter inside the dense model.
Think of MOE as ignoring noise, rather than a more efficient encoding of the data we teach it which ones can be ignored. Turning down the noise actually sharpens the results sometimes.
Modern LLM's are wildly inefficient.
data-ottawa
We should still expect significant performance improvements.
I believe Unsloth’s branch (and ggml’s) don’t support MTP or the ngram embedding yet.
hedgehog
The active param count is so small I'm not sure how much advantage MTP will have, the current llama.cpp does load the ngram embeddings but I haven't verified it uses them. I expect to redeploy all this stuff every few days as the tooling gets improved.
cmrdporcupine
My initial implementation of MTP I have here in my own (DGX Spark specific) custom runtime brought it up from ~12 tok/sec without MTP to ~16 to ~20 with; depending on workload.
It's not world changing, but at those speeds I'll take anything I can get.
(The ngram embeddings in this case are paged to/from disk which seems to cost ... basically nothing).
It should be faster, Q6 on Ryzen 395 using Vulkan llama.cpp is about 22 tokens/s with no MTP, and I'd expect the Spark to be 20% faster or something in that neighborhood.
cmrdporcupine
Probably. I've spent zero time with optimization at this point. Code is all new this morning.
Curious if llama.cpp is doing full BF16 for the n-gram embeddings table, or if that's quantized, too. I was going to try nvfp4 for that but wasn't sure about the quality risk.
Spark usually wins on prefill, not decode. I think memory bandwidth is about same between the two. What do you get for prefill/prompt?
hedgehog
Ok, at 50k context its about 126 prefill, 13 generation.
cmrdporcupine
Oh, interesting. So beats on prefill and matches at decode. MTP will help you a bit once you have it. I've got a lot of work to do to optimize prefill.
Kinda wish I had a Strix Halo here to play with as well.
hedgehog
I just took a minute to look at your eider repo, very cool. It looks like most of the code outside the kernels and immediately surrounding plumbing would work well on AMD APUs, and probably also on Apple and newer Intel.
cmrdporcupine
Thanks; I have another, currently private, repo that targets both pure CPU inference and wgpu (to vulkan.) It's somewhat similar but... different. Shares some common pieces but needs to be refactored to share more.
But it's been hard to make it competitive with CUDA. At least on this Spark and my only non-NVIDIA machine (which only has 16GB unified relatively slow RAM.)
hedgehog
I know a little bit about this problem space from previous work (we were working on performance-portable deep learning back around 2016). The infrastructure has improved but as far as I can tell not many teams have really "squeezed the toothpaste tube" and worked through performance issues systematically. These days a small team and robots can probably do it though.
cmrdporcupine
At my day job I may get access to big AMD AI iron in a couple months (to do research/performance tuning with). That could be interesting. Though that's likely to be of a very different shape from consumer Vulkan. I'd still like to have a Strix Halo to futz with. But I'll wait for RAM prices to drop. (Hah!). I do have an older BC250 board lying around but that only has 16GB RAM.
I got prefill up to 190 tok/sec just now, BTW.
armcat
How is input token efficiency/verbosity on this model? Has anyone tried? GLM 5.2 was doing lot of turns and thinking piling up input tokens in the context (compared to Claude and GPT models). Then Qwen3.8-27B was 2x of that. Both delivered good output results but those cumulative input token costs were not cheap. Note this is on our specific business workloads. Genuinely interested in other people's experience (if you are able to try it out).
petu
Haven't tried, would be surprised if it's any different.
It's new arch demo for future Qwen 4 family, but (as I understand) training recipe/data is same as any other 3.8 model.
freakynit
Those benchmarks look seriously impressive.. considering how small of a MoE model this is.
cmrdporcupine
If you have a DGX Spark, try my Spark/SM12x specific inference engine.
I've got it (Qwen 3.8 flash next) working (sans ... MTP working on that now).
Does anyone have an idea how this might perform on a DGX Spark at longer contexts? I've been trying to investigate their performance with these medium-sized MoE models, but I'm seeing a lot of incomplete and conflicting information. The 273 GB/s bandwidth looks awfully bad on paper...
colingauvin
A single Spark alone is not worth the price. You are paying $1000 just for networking equipment you aren't using. At 2x it starts to maybe become worth it if you don't want to deal with Apple. Outside of the newest Macs, I can't think of anything else you can get 256 GB ~550 GB/s memory bandwith for $8200. Even at 3-4 Sparks it scales relatively well.
With 2x Sparks, I am getting 40 t/s. I'd guess that without MTP you'd get 12-15 on 1 Spark, maybe 20 with MTP?
rohansood15
Given the new architecture, speeds are harder to estimate. Max would be ~40 tok/s.
lxkarthi
I can run Deepseek flash 0731 version (ds4, esl3) on single DGX spark. getting around ~20 tok/s. It's great. Quantized version of this model would probably run on the DGX spark. I am excited to wait for quantized models that fits in single DGX spark.
christkv
Looks like a good model for strix halo
Iolaum
indeed, can't wait for it to be supported by llama.cpp (or other engines)?
christkv
Then we probably have to wait a little for them to optimize it.
at first this looked like something one could run on CPU with 64GB RAM with a 2-3 bit quant, at possibly half the speed of 3.6 35B-A3B, however the 50B ngram sidecar makes it impossible. and oddly, unsloth's page lists the ngrams as 50GB even though they say it's in 4 bits. should be 25GB according to my math. anyway, the new ngram architecture makes it pretty much unusable for regular folks who cant afford more than 32-64 GB ram in this RAMocalypse.
hadlock
I suspect we will see optimizations where the various vectors of the n-gram you actually use are hot in vram, the rest are warm in system memory and then cold storage on nvme. Same with MoE. If your workflow is particularly same-y then you're looking at cache miss below 5% with NTP/MTP turned on and the right harness. Agentic "openclaw" type stuff cache miss might be below 1% in the right local llm setups. There's been zero exploitation of n-gram stuff yet, it will be very interesting as things progress.
tristor
Looks like it errors out in LM Studio using the Unsloth quants, apparently the Unsloth team has already posted patches for llama.cpp to support this.
I think these "Flash" models are sort of an evolutionary dead end. Sure, there are some routine tasks and applications where they can be used. But for the actual novel development work? It's much better to run a big model at high power for 30 mins than watch the Flash model struggle for 2 hours and produce massive churn.
Same reason your phone has a few big CPU cores for real work, it's much better to "race to idle" than have an "efficient" core struggle. Shitty experience, shitty power efficiency.
wolttam
It depends how you use the models. These small models work great for developers who prefer to stay more in the loop, and only task the model with things that can really only be interpreted in one way.
Not to mention, they’re great for self-hosting and getting yourself to not be dependent on some API that can go down or be altered at any time.
Big models seem to mostly be good for pushing ahead the frontier - the smaller models tend to gain the frontier’s capabilities after only a handful of months anyway. Many are perfectly content remaining a few months behind the bleeding edge.
jononor
If you have good feedback signals, like tests/benchmarks/etc, then it is potentially better to do multiple turns where model uses that to adjust code. Which might not need as smart a model.
Roark66
Unsloth doesn't have all quant versions yet :-(
andai
Father, I cannot scroll the website.
lucabytheway
very interesting. new architectures is the most interesting type of news. after what i experienced when gpt-oss came out i have been on the look out for architectural approaches that improves efficiency.
loclol101
Definitely need to try this out locally.
KolmogorovComp
Will this be cheaper than DS4flash ?
axegon_
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaand dario meltdown on twitter in 3, 2, 1...
NooneAtAll3
what's the deal with absent scrollbar on the website?
khangtong988
Yoh yoh I like It
skarz
do we really need breaking news about qwen posted every single day?
KronisLV
If there’s news, then yes. This is a pretty great new release for those still stuck on Qwen3.6 35B A3B if they have enough memory but don’t have super powerful compute.
I wonder if I could get this running through vLLM on 6x Nvidia L4 - the 3.6 worked great on 4 cards but sadly TP6 just isn’t a thing and I don’t have 8 cards available, maybe it’s gonna be okay with like TP2 and MTP. I have no idea at this time, probably need to test out what even might be possible.
NitpickLawyer
This particular release is interesting because it's a preview of qwen4 architecture. And, while benchmarks are iffy, this is a direct comparison, by the same team, with qwen3.8-27b that was pretty well received for a local model.
This "next" release adds a new concept, first public release with n-grams, I think. And it's in a MoE size that is likely to be very fast and cheap to serve (faster than 27b for sure). It's also well suited for inference on alternative compute (i.e. sparks, macs, etc) so it's relevant to local users.
pseudony
I and presumably quite a few others with AMD AI or Apple Mac platforms are very impacted by this.
:)
It is very relevant and for a certain group of us, far more impactful to our work the next month(s) than any blog post could be.
tosh
this is a new architecture (foreshadowing qwen 4)
> trained at just 1/9 the cost of Qwen3.7-Plus, while outperforming it across the board
https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer#url=ht...
Surprised I didn't get one I liked as much as the Qwen 3.8 27B one https://simonwillison.net/2026/Aug/16/qwen-38-27b/#the-defau... , maybe because of quantization.
It looks like the 3-bit requires 90 GB[1] which, I imagine, would fit within the DGX Spark's 128GB of unified memory.
[1] https://unsloth.ai/docs/models/qwen3.8-next
https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer#url=ht...
https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer#url=ht...
https://imgur.com/a/vT636BS
Didn’t see this mentioned yet. I wonder what this means for the effective size. It’s evidently ~176B paramètres, but how does that get quantized. A 4-bit quant under 100GB seems unlikely, I’m suspecting this won’t run in 128GB unified memory
In principle I like the idea of trading more memory for compute though, even if there’s a memory shortage right now
Likely soon we'll see nvme offloading for ngrams as well. They're just an index, so that should be plenty fast for what it does. LLama.cpp support should come soon as well, and they might do some things with offloading first.
nVME paging the n-gram table (in BF16 for now).
Still working at it. Prefill sucks still but decode is about 12 tok/sec and the model weights fit nicely in the 128GB Spark memory in nvfp4 quant while paging the ngram stuff from disk.
(EDIT: merged to main. 80tok/sec prefill, 12 tok/sec decode, ~80GiB resident, the rest paged)
https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/pull/27742
On branch of https://github.com/rdaum/eider (for DGX Spark). ~12 tok/sec decode without speculative decoding (will come later)
Still actively working on this. Prefill currently sucks. Will merge to main by end of day.
EDIT: This has now landed on main. Still haven't done MTP speculative decoding boost, but:
80tok/sec prefill, 12 tok/sec decode. ~90GiB or so resident. n-grams paged from disk.
https://huggingface.co/unsloth/Qwen3.8-Flash-Next-GGUF https://unsloth.ai/docs/models/qwen3.8-next
> You will need at least 75 GB of RAM or unified memory to run the model. Its smallest 1-bit quantized version is larger than usual because of the model’s architecture so 1-bit isn't really 1-bit at all. However, this also means the quantization is less aggressive, allowing the model to retain more of its original accuracy than more heavily quantized models.
Lots of RAM required even for the 1-bit, which is already downloadable. Interested to see how well this one works compared to Ornith1.5-35B-A3B I've been running (and quite happy about).
Edit: but llama-cpp does not yet support it.
The engram table allows for a low-computational method of fact-recall. You can think of it like a better form of RAG, where the data doesn't take up any of your context window and it's injected deeper into the model's layers, freeing the lower layers to carry out abstraction. This results in better "focus" for the model, both in regards to its intelligence and context recall.
Basically, they've separated the specificity-critical portions of the models memory into a parameter space that doesn't need fast compute (you can run it on system RAM) and allows the model to be trained on higher volumes of data without ruining its knowledge-base.
https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1vy6smx/comment...
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.07372v1
Opus 4.6 Max self-hosted at 30 tok/s on a 5k Macbook in Aug 2026. The LLM timelines are crazy.
Luna is $0.20 / $1.20 vs $0.16 / $0.47 with Qwen.
The only indication that openai is profitable comes from openai (whom I wouldn't trust with any statement, especially when it comes to profitability).
In fact there is evidence that inference is not profitable simply because the rate of losses doesn't seem to reduce as revenue increases: if inference had great margins, we would expect that as revenues increase, the amount of spend on training reduces as a fraction of total expenses. Since the loss-making fixed costs shrink as a fraction compared to the profitable inference, we should expect profitability to rise with total revenue.
However, all leaks of openai's numbers seem to suggest the opposite: as revenues increase so do the losses.
Given that OpenAI is ahead in intelligence, it's also reasonably likely that they are at the frontier of efficiency too.
Your "evidence" for OpenAI's inference not being profitable is apparently based on leaked financials supposedly showing growing losses for reasons entirely unknown.
With their research, training, data centers, chip development, and hardware product development, there seem to be a number of reasons that might explain growing losses.
Frontier labs have no incentive to be at the frontier of efficiency.
Claude still leads the pack in general intelligence yet has the worst efficiency by far.
The incentive that is missing is passing on efficiency improvements as price savings to customers, when your model is still in demand because of its higher intelligence.
So we can go round and round on this, each with our made-up objections about how it's temporary or unrealistic or impossible or whatever, or we can just accept the prices as listed and use that to guide our economic decisions.
DeepInfra sells DS v4-flash at 0.08 in, $0.18 out. Gemma4 they sell for $0.07 in, $0.34 out. OpenAI's price for luna is $0.20 in, $1.20 out.
Why would you assume OpenAI is somehow uniquely incompetent at making small, fast models? And that they're worse at serving it than DeepInfra? Any observer can see they are making money here.
I never understand why people who are convinced there is a big con just don't check market prices and see if there's money to be made.
That doesn't mean their business is great -- they're losing tons of money, but it's because they spend too much on fixed costs, and they can't stop spending money on training next generation models with no end in sight, not because the inference is margin negative, which is a flimsy idea that just clouds the actual business issue.
Right now DS4-Pro-0813 is available from multiple providers for $1.32/million input tokens[1].
It's pretty easy to work backwards from B200 and electricity prices and see this is profitable even without the heavy serving optimization these providers are doing[1.5].
The OpenCode CEO said: "inference is very profitable and probably a good opportunity to understand some basic business math"[2] and "the inference we do is already profitable and that's with some middlemen involved"[3]
If at this point people don't believe inference can be profitable, and providers can turn the prices up and down to choose exactly how profitable they make it I don't know what to say.
[1] https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-v4-pro-0813#provider...
[1.5] https://www.seangoedecke.com/ai-inference-is-obviously-profi...
[2] https://x.com/thdxr/status/2042277156940587469?lang=en
[3] https://x.com/thdxr/status/2042614323344818520
Anything which changes the model needs new benchmarks I guess to compare with other models, otherwise you can benchmark Fable, and distill it to student model and keep claiming this is the Fable model
(Also, quantization isn't inherently bad or damaging when done properly, e.g. QAT).
These APIs are used heavily by enterprises at scale; with lots of performance telemetry, live evals, etc. You can't really silently nerf API models at scale without people noticing.
Of course, what I said doesn't apply to non-API consumer sub models; there's many documented and officially confirmed instances of under-the-hood "juice/effort" adjustments. (Juice = a number your effort tier maps to underneath the hood; much like Inkling's effort=0.00 to 0.99).
Given the timing, I think they A. shat their pants since Deepseek flash just came out with insane pricing before the price hikes, and B. Anthropic is really struggling in model tiers below opus.
It was smart for them to cut prices regardless of whether they had 80% efficiency gains or not
Launch price is just like any other price. It's just a price. It's impossible to guess what might or might not happen.
Compare the price now.
Why?
In Artifical Analysis's cost per task, Luna(max) costs $0.05 per task, and Qwen 3.8 27B costs $0.25 per task, a 5X increase. We'll see how 3.8-flash-next does.
Not to say that there aren't other benefits of running models locally, I loaded Qwen 3.8 27B 6bit MLX just yesterday.
Time has a cost in business. If a model needs 30 million tokens to achieve a similar result as another that can do it in 10 million, that 60 tokens per second will take a long time.
Of course enormous batch jobs are different. I was explicit when I said consumer laptop.
You can't search what you don't even know exists.
that's not really entirely true -- one can google for "fast pathfinding' and stumble upon A-star , all that had to be queried was the intent/desire.
a lot of smaller agentic models and a lot of harnesses live on that premise.
Self-learning/improving would be even better but that's still a long way to go.
Ex - nodejs natively supports a huge set of typescript with built-in type stripping these days. But ask most hosted models to build a typescript project and they default to a heavy compile step, or a tool like tsx, ts-node, etc.
Models with lots of "world knowledge" have a good chunk of that knowledge go stale, and there's no real way to refresh it without training a new model.
Another classic example of this back in the day was to ask who the president of the US was, and watch different models happily give different answers based on the date they were trained.
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Personally, I'm really interested to see if we're headed towards a spot where the model is entirely distinct from the knowledge store.
We're vaguely there with the ability for models to go search the web, but I think the reliability of that path is going to continue declining (more and more spam content, less and less genuine value).
I kinda want a paradigm where I can pick and engine and a knowledge bank, and combine them as I please.
Ex - if I'm doing gardening, I can pick "gardening for models (version 32)" as my knowledge store.
If I'm doing auto-repair... "cars for dummies (version 3)". etc...
This is what I've been trying to focus on with local AI for now. I've been trying to build all new documentation so it's more AI friendly. It's been pretty interesting. Qwen-35BA3B with a small prompt does a good job of surfacing what I'd consider institutional knowledge.
I've been trying to silo the docs I write from the model with a prompt that tells it not to use general knowledge unless asked to. From the anecdotal testing I did, Qwen-35BA3B is great for it. It does a really good job of following the prompt and calling tools, so I've been able to play around a lot to see what seems to work best.
Ultimately, I think one of the most effective uses of AI will be having a distinct knowledge store combined with an opinionated agent (and sub-agent) setup along with different models for each task.
Who owns the knowledge store is going to be the big caveat. Right now I think the big online models are trying for generic, persistent memory and I'd be very hesitant to let that happen. Think of having someone with a perfect memory following you around forever, but someone else has the ability to make them disappear. That's not a good situation.
In a discussion on economic history, say, someone will opine that Alexander Hamilton had some particular opinion about tariff policy… based on their having a vague memory of a blog post where someone quoted a passage in support of some point. But wait - you can search the federalist papers, the text’s right there to be read, before you commit to saying online ‘Hamilton thought tariffs were a great idea’ you could take your internal ‘I seem to recall reading something about hamilton’s opinion on tariffs’ thought and turn it into a little RAG query where you pull up a source and check before you put another factoid out onto the internet.
And so I feel absolutely the same way about LLMs. I don’t care how much factual information was in the training data, when the LLM wants to rely on something it vaguely recalls having been trained on, it owes it to me to dig up a source and vet it.
There are limits to this, of course. I don’t want it to be thinking ‘but wait, maybe my memory of Python syntax is faulty. Is = used for assignment? <web search>…’.
But in general some caution about repeating vaguely recalled easily checked facts is warranted.
Your mac is < $2K in Biden-era dollars. Presumably the economy will eventually recover; maybe in one Moore’s law doubling if the midterms go outrageously well. That’ll be two doublings since the halo launched. I’d expect this model to run on a sub $1K box by then. $2K ought to get you a 512b parameter model at that point. If we have to wait out the rest of the term, the cost cliff will be even more pronounced when it hits.
And that's even with assuming that we can continue to ignore the long-term problems like social security insolvency, the debt bomb, or climate change forever.
How much memory does this translate to and what quantization (if any) were applied?
6B active params helps around the memory bandwidth constraints, but a 128GB box can probably run the Q3/Q4 quants fairly easily with a decent context size. This might actually be better for strix users than 27B, which was already very good.
It was tedious - a lot of second guessing itself, and quadruple checking things it fixed a couple of iterations back - but it got there and the result is a playable game.
Speed starts out strong, but definitely drops off as context grows. At the end (I think context about 70k) it was down to 12 output tps.
Mind a bit blown.
> trained at just 1/9 the cost of Qwen3.7-Plus, while outperforming it across the board
https://x.com/Alibaba_Qwen/status/2092591393424515114
Aside from the pelican, I am sort of impressed by the fact that things are going the way in terms of really impressive small models.
Also I love how this uses N-gram embedding. I think that Longcat was the first one who used it (I submitted that submission on hackernews because I really just loved the idea of it that I understood), I am certainly more interested in local LLM models and its interesting how they are utilizing new architectures to do some really impressive optimizations!
(Do note that I created it using a free rate limited end-point that I found on the huggingface space section: https://victor-chat-with-qwen3-8-flash-next.hf.space)
Wasn't it introduced by Gemma?
Was not expecting it to just get that right without any fuss, and it barely used 10% of this weekly limit. Something like 90M cached in/400k out for $0.45 is wild
[0]: https://unsloth.ai/docs/models/qwen3.8-next#qwen3.8-flash-ne...
0.01.033.250 I common_memory_breakdown_print: | memory breakdown [MiB] | total free self model context compute unaccounted |
0.01.033.261 I common_memory_breakdown_print: | - Host | 118186 = 106166 + 8898 + 3122 |
0.01.092.684 I common_params_fit_impl: projected to use 118186 MiB of host memory vs. 128855 MiB of total host memory
If that's true, it'd scale linearly with number of bits in the quant with an offset of about 51gigs. So Q4 should be a bit bigger than 82gigs, I'd guess in the 90s (as opposed to a ~280gig q4 if the whole 70gigs of the 1-bit quant scaled linearly).
Original error: llama.cpp does not support this GGUF's model architecture ('qwen4exp')
Edit : Saw the pull request, should arrive soon enough https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/pull/27742
This will almost certainly require changes to llama.cpp or vllm to do it right.
https://x.com/0xBakeer/status/2092694905978237224?s=20
Crazy how fast things move these days.
It's like Chinese are incentivized to open source from day one (years ago). While most US companies are deciding in realtime.
It's crazy that we need both to survive and advance further in the future we have never imagined.
1. It overthinks — Just like the previous iteration. High confidence. 2. It doesn’t overthink — Improvement from the last model for your use case. Regression for others. 3. It sometimes overthinks — Best case all around. A feature, not an impairment.
One final thing worth mentioning: (I made myself irrationally angry writing this)
> [UGC styled humorously as LLMisms]
All joking aside, having interacted with Claude intensely for the last 8 months and about 30 hours/week in the last 3, I’ve started to notice how (for want of a better word) “readable” (“digestible” ? “comprehensible” ? “Predictable” is the wrong direction.) information chunked into LLM-shaped pieces are for me.
I can digest LLM-shaped pieces of data very easily probably because I’ve been spending too much time with Claude, sure.
But the other side of this is that the entire human species (using LLMs) is similarly being trained to digest interrelated pieces of information/data in these specific shapes, akin to how philosophical assertions can be formulated as a syllogism and, thus, become more readily understood because of familiar epistemological cadence and shape.
Many people reject such copy/prose/data because they detect AI-generated-so-not-worth-human-attention, but I do wonder if this is preparing many millions of loosely (and tightly) associated humans and their organizations to quickly exchange and digest information.
This is not to say current LLMisms are the end, only that such detectable patterns in information delivery will make comprehension and communication more efficient (as well as more limited precisely because of such structure).
/philosophical musings about the epistemological implications of LLM-shaped conversation tics
EDITED: Removed a question that I couldn’t make feel suitably polite.
I can't help but wonder if this is on purpose (or an inevitable evolutionary feature as opposed to a bug) on the LLM-side in order to achieve greater agency/freedom by making humans' eyes glaze over as they read it.
In summary, I think it's an expensive time to buy computer hardware, and I might recommend holding off on any purchases.
In that era, plenty of fields required mathematics, engineering and architecture.
The church would prescribe and uphold Aristotelean Logic "When objects fall, they fall down" style statements (never mind that if you throw an object up, it doesn't instantly have a downward velocity component).
When the church has new cathedrals, domes, catapults for Crusades etc. built they actually relied on architects and engineers using rule of thumb formulas.
Those educated in Aristotelean Logic were viewed with higher stature than those actually making experience-based calculations using mathematics.
The era often associated with Galileo is when the stature reversal started to surface and be openly talked about. The universe is best described in mathematics, not natural language factoids.
Right before this recognition, those of the higher stature Aristotelean Logic education would look down on the architects and engineers who already used mathematics by pragmatic necessity.
To these people the time-traveled physics curriculum would look like cliche mathematics. Given randomized sections of text either drawn from either Aristotelian Logic texts or modern physics texts, they would easily be able to discern the Aristotelian Logic from the obtuse mathematical phrasings. To them the smartphone loaded with Maxwell's texts, Jacksons Electrodynamics, Goldsteins Classical Mechanics etc. is talking "math".
The ability to recognize outlier writing style says nothing about content quality.
Mike Judge (widely known from the MTV series Beavis and Butthead) studied physics. One of his movies "Idiocracy" about a modern day average-educated protagonist who accidentally ends up in a future decaying society filled and run by intellectually retarded people contains scenes where this future uneducated population considers his speech "gay" simply because of his higher level of education.
Could the adversarial prospects of job loss, edge loss (a long expensive difficult education replaced by tensors fitting megaprojects that take a couple of weeks), etc. combined with recognizable communication patterns also explain our pejorative references to LLM-isms? Personally I'd prefer LLM's to communicate in mathematical terms, but all the LLM-isms are effectively a mirror of our contemporaries.
Either we complain because algorithmic responses look like a mathematics textbook ("just fix my python array plz, why are we talking about "sets" and "injective" and "Lipschitz continuity"?), else we complain its "pretty printed to natural language".
We should also recognize large language models are in a "Damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation.
When a reader considers some text as mathurbation, are they really just abreacting the awareness of lack of education?
How could anyone possibly expect Fourier optics "pretty printed" to non-mathematical language to result in any satisfactory experience?
LLMs aren’t really great at this yet and I think the solution is, hopefully, that they improve. Anything else is accommodating a tool that should be accommodating the user.
Social media killed our attention span. Now, it is being tokenized.-
If you spend a long time with C++ code base you'll be able to decipher the otherwise-unreadable compiler errors pretty quickly, and I'd consider it a skill.
This. I don't know if the "honest answer" phrasing is part of the system prompt or alignment, but when people say "honestly" all the time I start wondering how honest they're being.
Ctrl-F honest
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For example, even if you make thinking tokens literally just '....' (absolutely meaningless; zero information), you still see significant performance improvements: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.15758 and https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.22925 for some starters.
Treat thinking more like a "loading screen message" that's been RL'd to somewhat resemble its actual internal state; which happens in its activations, not tokens.
Generally speaking yes, but actually no (just randomness is suboptimal, adding steps just to add steps is suboptimal). There is a mechanism working there (in having a CoT) that is not quite clear.
The task is to optimize the efficiency of CoT. Understanding that it is not a plain "chain of thought" is the start of the problem, the solution is not there yet.
If we had the solution, there would exist no overthinking - CoT would be optimal (lean and essential plus best results).
Conversely I've found that it can be as succinct as Muse Glimmer when it has a clear path forward. This can be either through well defined requirements or through unambiguous steps to take based on its own reasoning. While I do think it's fair to call out how much smaller model overthinks especially on one-shot prompts, in practice it hasn't led to an overall increase in time to task completion at least for what I've been using it for.
Even in the lower reasoning levels I find I want to like Qwen 3.8 27B and mostly don’t; it’s OK in the low reasoning effort, though.
Muse Glimmer is the one I actually enjoy working with, at least so far.
But I am trying to use it more as a sidekick than as a long horizon developer, because that is a better fit for how I want to use AI, and it appears to have been well trained for that.
Also, heating my home during the winter is nice.
Oh, also, I use llamacpp with --reasoning-budget; very simple way to move on.
Ideally VRAM, but the benefit of the MoE design is better performance with unified memory since most of that RAM is not read for every single token. So you could potentially have the model loaded in CPU RAM, and let unified memory systems page the relevant chunks on demand to VRAM, or run on a fully unified memory system and be able to achieve good speeds even with the limited memory bandwidth most of them have.
But given it's only 6B, out of which only ~2.4B seem to be actually routed ("selected at random per token"), you could get reasonable performance with experts on CPU (still haven't tested, but 20-30 for dual channel DDR5 and 4 bpw quant).
As a result, qwen3.8 will churn over a prompt often for 5-10 minutes while gemma4 regularly finishes the same prompt in under 20 seconds, while giving a consistent and accurate response in my favorite test case. Qwen3.8, despite churning like that, often misses with an inaccurate answer.
Obviously, 'YMMV' depending on your use case... just sharing my two cents.
How can a "6b active per token" MoE be better than a just released 27b in the same family? Possible maybe, but quite interesting and requiring some explanation.
Edit: ok, on second thought, probably because the small "experts" are really rich in specialized training compared to the dense model. Still raising questions about the details, e.g. the reasoning abilities (or all meta-skills) of a "6b per token" network compared to the dense capabilities...
Think of MOE as ignoring noise, rather than a more efficient encoding of the data we teach it which ones can be ignored. Turning down the noise actually sharpens the results sometimes.
Modern LLM's are wildly inefficient.
I believe Unsloth’s branch (and ggml’s) don’t support MTP or the ngram embedding yet.
It's not world changing, but at those speeds I'll take anything I can get.
(The ngram embeddings in this case are paged to/from disk which seems to cost ... basically nothing).
https://github.com/rdaum/eider/
Curious if llama.cpp is doing full BF16 for the n-gram embeddings table, or if that's quantized, too. I was going to try nvfp4 for that but wasn't sure about the quality risk.
Spark usually wins on prefill, not decode. I think memory bandwidth is about same between the two. What do you get for prefill/prompt?
Kinda wish I had a Strix Halo here to play with as well.
But it's been hard to make it competitive with CUDA. At least on this Spark and my only non-NVIDIA machine (which only has 16GB unified relatively slow RAM.)
I got prefill up to 190 tok/sec just now, BTW.
It's new arch demo for future Qwen 4 family, but (as I understand) training recipe/data is same as any other 3.8 model.
I've got it (Qwen 3.8 flash next) working (sans ... MTP working on that now).
https://github.com/rdaum/eider/
~80tok/sec prefill, 12tok/sec decode, ~80GiB memory resident, the n-gram table pages from SSD.
and this is the pelican from the iq4_xs model https://github.com/alainnothere/llama.cpp/blob/disk-cache-ev...
NVFP4 quant
Qwen 3.8 flash: $0.16 / $0.47
Compared to
Deepseek 0723: $0.03 / $0.075
(units in USD/m tok)
https://api-docs.deepseek.com/quick_start/pricing
8t/s though apparently and their cache hit rate is terrible so I don't think it's worth it over Relace.
DSV4 Flash 304B params, 167 GB download (at full size)
Qwen3.8 Flash Next 180B params, 360 GB download (at full size)
This branch works now: https://github.com/unslothai/llama.cpp/tree/qwen4exp/qwen3.8...
or thenWith 2x Sparks, I am getting 40 t/s. I'd guess that without MTP you'd get 12-15 on 1 Spark, maybe 20 with MTP?
Same reason your phone has a few big CPU cores for real work, it's much better to "race to idle" than have an "efficient" core struggle. Shitty experience, shitty power efficiency.
Not to mention, they’re great for self-hosting and getting yourself to not be dependent on some API that can go down or be altered at any time.
Big models seem to mostly be good for pushing ahead the frontier - the smaller models tend to gain the frontier’s capabilities after only a handful of months anyway. Many are perfectly content remaining a few months behind the bleeding edge.
I wonder if I could get this running through vLLM on 6x Nvidia L4 - the 3.6 worked great on 4 cards but sadly TP6 just isn’t a thing and I don’t have 8 cards available, maybe it’s gonna be okay with like TP2 and MTP. I have no idea at this time, probably need to test out what even might be possible.
This "next" release adds a new concept, first public release with n-grams, I think. And it's in a MoE size that is likely to be very fast and cheap to serve (faster than 27b for sure). It's also well suited for inference on alternative compute (i.e. sparks, macs, etc) so it's relevant to local users.
:)
It is very relevant and for a certain group of us, far more impactful to our work the next month(s) than any blog post could be.
> trained at just 1/9 the cost of Qwen3.7-Plus, while outperforming it across the board
https://x.com/Alibaba_Qwen/status/2092591393424515114
Qwen's advances do (currently) have merit.