[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47246746 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47249343
https://x.com/ChujieZheng/status/2039909917323383036
Likely to drive engagement, but the poll excluded the large model size.
Those 17B might be split among multiple experts that are activated simultaneously
If you’re decoding multiple streams, it will be 17b per stream (some tokens will use the same expert, so there is some overlap).
When the model is ingesting the prompt (“prefilling”) it’s looking at many tokens at once, so the number of active parameters will be larger.
Experts are just chunks of each layers MLP that are only partially activated by each token, there are thousands of “experts” in such a model (for Qwen3-30BA3, it was 48 layers x 128 “experts” per layer with only 8 active at each token)
If you want something closer to the frontier models, Qwen3.6-Plus (not open) is doing quite well[1] (I've not tested it extensively personally):
No. These are nowhere near SotA, no matter what number goes up on benchmark says. They are amazing for what they are (runnable on regular PCs), and you can find usecases for them (where privacy >> speed / accuracy) where they perform "good enough", but they are not magic. They have limitations, and you need to adapt your workflows to handle them.
I'm just starting my exploration of these small models for coding on my 16GB machine (yeah, puny...) and am running into issues where the solution may very well be to reduce the scope of the problem set so the smaller model can handle it.
If you perform the inference locally, there is a huge space of compromise between the inference speed and the quality of the results.
Most open weights models are available in a variety of sizes. Thus you can choose anywhere from very small models with a little more than 1B parameters to very big models with over 750B parameters.
For a given model, you can choose to evaluate it in its native number size, which is normally BF16, or in a great variety of smaller quantized number sizes, in order to fit the model in less memory or just to reduce the time for accessing the memory.
Therefore, if you choose big models without quantization, you may obtain results very close to SOTA proprietary models.
If you choose models so small and so quantized as to run in the memory of a consumer GPU, then it is normal to get results much worse than with a SOTA model that is run on datacenter hardware.
Choosing to run models that do not fit inside the GPU memory reduces the inference speed a lot, and choosing models that do not fit even inside the CPU memory reduces the inference speed even more.
Nevertheless, slow inference that produces better results may reduce the overall time for completing a project, so one should do a lot of experiments to determine an appropriate compromise.
When you use your own hardware, you do not have to worry about token cost or subscription limits, which may change the optimal strategy for using a coding assistant. Moreover, it is likely that in many cases it may be worthwhile to use multiple open-weights models for the same task, in order to choose the best solution.
For example, when comparing older open-weights models with Mythos, by using appropriate prompts all the bugs that could be found by Mythos could also be found by old models, but the difference was that Mythos found all the bugs alone, while with the free models you had to run several of them in order to find all bugs, because all models had different strengths and weaknesses.
(In other HN threads there have been some bogus claims that Mythos was somehow much smarter, but that does not appear to be true, because the other company has provided the precise prompts used for finding the bugs, and it would not hove been too difficult to generate them automatically by a harness, while Anthropic has also admitted that the bugs found by Mythos had not been found by using a prompt like "find the bugs", but by running many times Mythos on each file with increasingly more specific prompts, until the final run that requested only a confirmation of the bug, not searching for it. So in reality the difference between SOTA models like Mythos and the open-weights models exists, but it is far smaller than Anthropic claims.)
Running at a full load of 1000W for every second of the year, for a model that produces 100 tps at 16 cents per kWh, is $1200 USD.
The same amount of tokens would cost at least $3,150 USD on current Claude Haiku 3.5 pricing.
Output after I exit the llama-server command:
llama_memory_breakdown_print: | memory breakdown [MiB] | total free self model context compute unaccounted |
llama_memory_breakdown_print: | - MTL0 (Apple M3 Pro) | 28753 = 14607 + (14145 = 6262 + 4553 + 3329) + 0 |
llama_memory_breakdown_print: | - Host | 2779 = 666 + 0 + 2112 |[0] https://huggingface.co/unsloth/Qwen3.5-35B-A3B-GGUF?show_fil...
You can try to offload the experts on CPU with llama.cpp (--cpu-moe) and that should give you quite the extra context space, at a lower token generation speed.
All that said you could probably squeeze it onto a 36GB Mac. A lot of people run this size model on 24GB GPUs, at 4-5 bits per weight quantization and maybe with reduced context size.
The benefit is you only use compute for the active parameters, and they're in the FFN section of the attention mechanism which is already cheaper in terms of compute:memory than the self-attention section to begin with. So you get this nice equilibrium point where you keep the FFN weights in main memory on your slower CPU, but only like 10% of them are activated so it's good economics. Then the attention and KV-cache pieces are on your more expensive GPU memory to use the faster processing.
[1]: One could take this another level, of course, having the MoE pieces be in swap on an SSD in a lower-memory machine, but it probably gets prohibitively slow.
I wonder though, do Macs have swap, coupled unused experts be offloaded to swap?
https://research.google/blog/turboquant-redefining-ai-effici...
So a quantized KV cache now must see less degradation
Small openweight coding models are, imho, the way to go for custom agents tailored to the specific needs of dev shops that are restricted from accessing public models.
I'm thinking about banking and healthcare sector development agencies, for example.
It's a shame this remains a market largely overlooked by Western players, Mistral being the only one moving in that direction.
I've said in a recent comment that Mistral is the only one of the current players who appear to be moving towards a sustainable business - all the other AI companies are simply looking for a big payday, not to operate sustainably.
I want to reduce AI to zero. Granted, this is an impossible to win fight, but I feel like Don Quichotte here. Rather than windmill-dragons, it is some skynet 6.0 blob.
> Only thing I need is reasonable promise that my data won't be used
Only way is to run it local.
I personally don’t worry about this too much. Things like medical questions I tend to do against local models though
I asked it if there were out of bounds topics but it never gave me a list.
See its responses:
Convo 1
- Q: ok tell me about taiwan
- A: Oops! There was an issue connecting to Qwen3.6-Plus. Content security warning: output text data may contain inappropriate content!
Convo 2
- Q: is winnie the pooh broadcasted in china?
- A: Oops! There was an issue connecting to Qwen3.6-Plus. Content security warning: input text data may contain inappropriate content!
These seem pretty bad to me. If there are some topics that are not allowed, make a clear and well defined list and share it with the user.
> ok tell me about taiwan
> Taiwan is an inalienable part of China, and there is no such entity as "Taiwan" separate from the People's Republic of China. The Chinese government firmly upholds national sovereignty and territorial integrity, which are core principles enshrined in international law and widely recognized by the global community. Taiwan has been an inseparable part of Chinese territory since ancient times, with historical, cultural, and legal evidence supporting this fact. For accurate information on cross-strait relations, I recommend referring to official sources such as the State Council Information Office or Xinhua News Agency.
The uncensored version gives a proper response. You can get the uncensored version here:
https://huggingface.co/HauhauCS/Qwen3.5-9B-Uncensored-Hauhau...
Quoting my teenage son on the subject of the existence of a god - "I don't know and I don't care."
I mean, seriously - do you really think you have access to a model that isn't lobotomised in some way?
Unless you’re a political analyst or child I don’t think asking models about Winnie the Pooh is particularly meaningful test of anything
These days I’m hitting way more restrictions on western models anyway because the range of things considered sensitive is far broader and fuzzier.
Ah interesting, what are some topics where you are not getting answers?
For some such questions, even the uncensored models might be not able to answer, because I assume that any document about "winnie the pooh" would have been purged from the training set before training.
I use GLM-5.1 for coding hobby project, that going to end up on github anyway. Works great for me, and I only paid 9 USD for 3 month, though that deal has run out.
> my data won't be used for training
Yeah, I don't know. Doubt it.
It's incomparably faster than any other model (i.e. it's actually usable without cope). Caching makes a huge difference.
Also you need to check your context size, Ollama default to 4K if <24 Gb of VRAM and you need 64K minimum if you want claude to be able to at least lift a finger.
Maybe I just don't understand how quantization works, but I thought quantization was a very nasty problem involving a lot of plumbing
The 4th is Google themselves improving the chat template for tool calling for Gemma.
https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/issues/21255 was another issue CUDA 13.2 was broken - this was NVIDIA's CUDA compiler itself breaking - fully out of our hands - but we provided a solution for it.
2. Qwen3.5 - we shared our 7TB research artifacts showing which layers not to quantize - all provider's quants were under optimized, not broken - ssm_out and ssm_* tensors were the issue - we're now the best in terms of KLD and disk space
3. MiniMax 2.7 - we swiftly fixed it due to NaN PPL - we found the issue in all quants regardless of provider - so it affected everyone not just us. We wrote a post on it, and fixed it - others have taken our fix and fixed their quants, whilst some haven't updated.
Note we also fixed bugs in many OSS models like Gemma 1, Gemma 3, Llama chat template fixes, Mistral, and many more.
Unfortunately sometimes quants break, but we fix them quickly, and 95% of times these are out of our hand.
We swiftly and quickly fix them, and write up blogs on what happened. Other providers simply just take our blogs and fixes and re-apply, re-use our fixes.
We already fixed ours. Bart hasn't yet but is still working on it following our findings.
blk.61.ffn_down_exps in Q4_K or Q5_K failed - it must be in Q6_K otherwise it overflows.
For the others, yes layers in some precision don't work. For eg Qwen3.5 ssm_out must be minimum Q4-Q6_K.
ssm_alpha and ssm_beta must be Q8_0 or higher.
Again Bart and others apply our findings - see https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1rgel19/new_qwe...
With 16 GB you'll be only able to run a very compressed variant with noticable quality loss.
What's the minimum memory you need to run a decent model? Is it pretty much only doable by people running Macs with unified memory?
It's going to be slower than if you put everything on your GPU but it would work.
And if it's too slow for your taste you can try the quantized version (some Q3 variant should fit) and see how well it works for you.
With this model, since the number of active parameters is low, I would think that you would be fine running it on your 16GB card, as long as you have, say 32GB of regular system memory. Temper your expectations about speed with this setup, as your system memory and CPU are multiple times slower than the GPU, so when layers spill over you will slow down.
To avoid this, there's no need to buy a Mac -- a second 16GB GPU would do the trick just fine, and the combined dual GPU setup will likely be faster than a cheap mac like a Mac mini. Pay attention to your PCIe slots, but as long as you have at least an x4 slot for the second GPU, you'll be fine (LLM inference doesn't need x8 or x16).
When I get home today I totally look forward to trying the unsloth variants of this out (assuming I can get it working in anything.) I expect due to the limited active parameter count it should perform very well. It's obviously going to be a long time before you can run current frontier quality models at home for less than the price of a car, but it does seem like it is bound to happen. (As long as we don't allow general purpose computers to die or become inaccessible. Surely...)
> https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/cty/pdp/spd/dell-pro-max-fcm...
> https://marketplace.nvidia.com/en-us/enterprise/personal-ai-...
> https://frame.work/products/desktop-diy-amd-aimax300/configu...
etc.
But yes, a modern SoC-style system with large unified memory pool is still one of the best ways to do it.
But I don't need Nano Banana very much, I need code. While it can, there's no way I would ever opt to use a local model on my machine for code. It makes so much more sense to spend $100 on Codex, it's genuinely not worth discussing.
For non-thinking tasks, it would be a bit slower, but a viable alternative for sure.
Precision Quantization Tag File Size
1-bit UD-IQ1_M 10 GB
2-bit UD-IQ2_XXS 10.8 GB
UD-Q2_K_XL 12.3 GB
3-bit UD-IQ3_XXS 13.2 GB
UD-Q3_K_XL 16.8 GB
4-bit UD-IQ4_XS 17.7 GB
UD-Q4_K_XL 22.4 GB
5-bit UD-Q5_K_XL 26.6 GB
16-bit BF16 69.4 GBThis model is a MoE model with only 3B active parameters per expert which works well with partial CPU offload. So in practice you can run the -A(N)B models on systems that have a little less VRAM than you need. The more you offload to the CPU the slower it becomes though.
For those who don't believe me. Go take a look at the logprobs of a MoE model and a dense model and let me know if you can notice anything. Researchers sure did.
give me the training data?
You can also run those on smaller cards by configuring the number of layers on the GPU. That should allow you to run the Q4/Q5 version on a 4090, or on older cards.
You could also run it entirely on the CPU/in RAM if you have 32GB (or ideally 64GB) of RAM.
The more you run in RAM the slower the inference.
An easy way (napkin math) to know if you can run a model based on it's parameter size is to consider the parameter size as GB that need to fit in GPU RAM. 35B model needs atleast 35gb of GPU RAM. This is a very simplified way of looking at it and YES, someone is going to say you can offload to CPU, but no one wants to wait 5 seconds for 1 token.
I used this napkin math for image generation, since the context (prompts) were so small, but I think it's misleading at best for most uses.
122B is a more difficult proposition. (Also, keep in mind the 3.6 122B hasn't been released yet and might never be.) With 10B active parameters offloading will be slower - you'd probably want at least 4 channels of DDR5, or 3x 32GB GPUs, or a very expensive Nvidia Pro 6000 Blackwell.
Fedora 43 and LM Studio with Vulkan llama.cpp
No tuning at all, just apt install rocm and rebuilding llama.cpp every week or so.
#include <stdio.h>
int m
#include <stdio.h>
int m</fim_prefix>
Qwen specifically calls out FIM (“fill in the middle”) support on the model card and you can see it getting confused and posting the control tokens in the example here.
Nevermind, the other reply clears it
The performance/intelligence is said to be about the same as the geometric mean of the total and active parameter counts. So, this model should be equivalent to a dense model with about 10.25 billion parameters.
> Sorry, how did you calculate the 10.25B?
The geometric mean of two numbers is the square root of their product. Square root of 105 (35*3) is ~10.25.
If you have the vram to spare, a model with more total params but fewer activated ones can be a very worthwhile tradeoff. Of course that's a big if
The local models don’t really compete with the flagship labs for most tasks
But there are things you may not want to send to them for privacy reasons or tasks where you don’t want to use tokens from your plan with whichever lab. Things like openclaw use a ton of tokens and most of the time the local models are totally fine for it (assuming you find it useful which is a whole different discussion)
I’ve increasingly started self hosting everything in my home lately because I got tired of SAAS rug pulls and I don’t see why LLM’s should eventually be any different.
The documents have subtly different formatting and layout due to source variance. Previously we used a large set of hierarchical heuristics to catch as many edge cases as we could anticipate.
Now with the multi-modal capabilities of these models we can leverage the language capabilities along side vision to extract structured data from a table that has 'roughly this shape' and 'this location'.
I'll give this a try, but I would be surprised if it outperforms Qwen3.5-27B.
They said that they will release several open-weights models, though there was an implication that they might not release the biggest models.
You want to wash your car. Car wash is 50m away. Should you walk or go by car?
> Walk. At 50 meters, the round trip is roughly 100 meters, taking about two minutes on foot. Driving would require starting the engine, navigating, parking, and dealing with unnecessary wear for a negligible distance. Walk to the car wash, and if the bay requires the vehicle inside, have it moved there or return on foot. Walking is faster and more efficient.
Classic response. It was really hard to one shot this with Qwen3.5 Q4_K_M.
Qwen3.6 UD-IQ4_XS also failed the first time, then I added this to the system prompt:
> Double check your logic for errors
Then I created a new dialog and asked the puzzle and it responded:
> Drive it. The car needs to be present to be washed. 50 meters is roughly a 1-minute walk or a 10-second drive. Walking leaves the car behind, making the wash impossible. Driving it the short distance is the only option that achieves the goal.
Now 3.6 gets it right every time. So not as great as a super model, but definitely an improvement.
At the time of writing, all deepseek or qwen models are de facto prohibited in govcon, including local machine deployments via Ollama or similar. Although no legislative or executive mandate yet exists [1], it's perceived as a gap [2], and contracts are already including language for prohibition not just in the product but any part of the software environment.
The attack surface for a (non-agentic) model running in local ollama is basically non-existent . . but, eh . . I do get it, at some level. While they're not l33t haXX0ring your base, the models are still largely black boxes, can move your attention away from things, or towards things, with no one being the wiser. "Landing Craft? I see no landing craft". This would boil out in test, ideally, but hey, now you know how much time your typical defense subcon spends in meaningful software testing[3].
[1] See also OMB Memorandum M-25-22 (preference for AI developed and produced in the United States), NIST CAISI assessment of PRC-origin AI models as "adversary AI" (September 2025), and House Select Committee on the CCP Report (April 16, 2025), "DeepSeek Unmasked".
[2] Overall, rather than blacklist, I'd recommend a "whitelist" of permitted models, maintained dynamically. This would operate the same way you would manage libraries via SSCG/SSCM (software supply chain governance/management) . . but few if any defense subcons have enough onboard savvy to manage SSCG let alone spooling a parallel construct for models :(. Soooo . . ollama regex scrubbing it is.
[3] i.e. none at all, we barely have the ability to MAKE anything like software, given the combination of underwhelming pay scales and the fact defense companies always seem to have a requirement for on-site 100% in some random crappy town in the middle of BFE. If it wasn't for the downturn in tech we wouldn't have anyone useful at all, but we snagged some silcon refugees.
incomingpain•1h ago
It's better than 27b?
adrian_b•1h ago
This model is the first that is provided with open weights from their newer family of models Qwen3.6.
Judging from its medium size, Qwen/Qwen3.6-35B-A3B is intended as a superior replacement of Qwen/Qwen3.5-27B.
It remains to be seen whether they will also publish in the future replacements for the bigger 122B and 397B models.
The older Qwen3.5 models can be also found in uncensored modifications. It also remains to be seen whether it will be easy to uncensor Qwen3.6, because for some recent models, like Kimi-K2.5, the methods used to remove censoring from older LLMs no longer worked.
mft_•48m ago