Yes it doesn't recall facts from training material as well but with tool use (e.g. wikipedia lookup) that's not a problem and even preferable to a larger model.
Can you share more insights on this? Going by @simonw's testing, the quantized model doesn't seem close to GPT-4 level.
I got a cute pelican out of it (with a smile!) https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jul/29/qwen3-30b-a3b-instruct...
I ran a version of it on my Mac using https://huggingface.co/lmstudio-community/Qwen3-30B-A3B-Inst... - it uses 30GB of RAM so probably needs 48GB for comfort.
Slightly frustrating. But good to know.
It would be nice having a fast local model that is good at using tools
Have you tried using them with something like Claude code or aider?
My notes (pelican and space invaders included) here: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jul/30/qwen3-30b-a3b-thinking...
This is the 5th model from Qwen in 9 days!
Qwen3-235B-A22B-Instruct-2507 - 21st July
Qwen3-Coder-480B-A35B-Instruct - 22nd July
Qwen3-235B-A22B-Thinking-2507 - 25th July
Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507 - 29th July
Qwen3-30B-A3B-Thinking-2507 - today
syntaxing•19h ago
rdos•19h ago
simonw•19h ago
littlestymaar•18h ago
I agree with GP that since Qwen is now releasing updated Qwen3 version without hybrid reasoning, and experience a significant performance boost in the process, it likely means that the hybrid reasoning experiment was a failure.
varispeed•19h ago
simonw•19h ago
ffsm8•16h ago
expressed more abstractly: is about drawing logical connections between points and extrapolating from them.
To quote the definition: "the action of thinking about something in a logical, sensible way."
I believe it's rooted in mathematics, not physics. That's probably why there is such a focus on the process instead of the result