I really hope this doesn't hinder development too much. As Simon says, Qwen3.5 is very impressive.
I've been testing Qwen3.5-35B-A3B over the past couple of days and it's a very impressive model. It's the most capable agentic coding model I've tested at that size by far. I've had it writing Rust and Elixir via the Pi harness and found that it's very capable of handling well defined tasks with minimal steering from me. I tell it to write tests and it writes sane ones ensuring they pass without cheating. It handles the loop of responding to test and compiler errors while pushing towards its goal very well.
I've been playing with 3.5:122b on a GH200 the past few days for rust/react/ts, and while it's clearly sub-Sonnet, with tight descriptions it can get small-medium tasks done OK - as well as Sonnet if the scope is small.
The main quirk I've found is that it has a tendency to decide halfway through following my detailed instructions that it would be "simpler" to just... not do what I asked, and I find it has stripped all the preliminary support infrastructure for the new feature out of the code.
> to decide halfway through following my detailed instructions that it would be "simpler" to just... not do what I asked
That's likely coming from the 3:1 ratio of linear to quadratic attention usage. The latest DeepSeek also suffers from it which the original R1 never exhibited.
That sounds awfully similar to what Opus 4.6 does on my tasks sometimes.
> Blah blah blah (second guesses its own reasoning half a dozen times then goes). Actually, it would be a simpler to just ...
Specifically on Antigravity, I've noticed it doing that trying to "save time" to stay within some artificial deadline.
It might have something to do with the system messages and the reinforcement/realignment messages that are interwoven into the context (but never displayed to end-users) to keep the agents on task.
Yeah that happened to me with Claude code opus 4.6 1M for the first time today. I had to check the model hadn’t changed. It was weird. I was imagining that maybe anthropic have a way of deciding how much resource a user actually gets and they had downgraded me suddenly or something.
For the uninitiated: Interestingly, it is not advisable to take this to the extreme and set temperature to 0.
That would seem logical, as the results are then completely deterministic, but it turns out that a suboptimal token may result in a better answer in the long run. Also, allowing for a little bit of noise gives the model room to talk itself out of a suboptimal path.
I like to think of this like tempering the output space. With a temperature of zero, there is only one possible output and it may be completely wrong. With even a low temperature, you drastically increase the chances that the output space contains a correct answer, through containing multiple responses rather than only one.
I wonder if determinism will be less harmful to diffusion models because they perform multiple iterations over the response rather than having only a single shot at each position that lacks lookahead. I'm looking forward to finding out and have been playing with a diffusion model locally for a few days.
Yup. I think of it as how off the rails do you want to explore?
For creative things or exploratory reasoning, a temperature of 0.8 lends us to all sorts of excursions down the rabbit hole. However, when coding and needing something precise, a temperature of 0.2 is what I use. If I don’t like the output, I’ll rephrase or add context.
> The main quirk I've found is that it has a tendency to decide halfway through following my detailed instructions that it would be "simpler" to just... not do what I asked,
This is my experience with the Qwen3-Next and Qwen3.5 models, too.
I can prompt with strict instructions saying "** DO NOT..." and it follows them for a few iterations. Then it has a realization that it would be simpler to just do the thing I told it not to do, which leads it to the dead end I was trying to avoid.
I've been testing the same with some rust, and it's has spent a fair bit of time going through an infinite seeming loop before finally unjamming itself. It seems a little more likely to jam up than some other models I've experimented with.
It's also driving itself crazy with deadpool & deadpool-r2d2 that it chose during planning phase.
That said, it does seem to be doing a very good job in general, the code it has created is mostly sane other than this fuss over the database layer, which I suspect I'll have to intervene on. It's certainly doing a better job than other models I'm able to self-host so far.
> it's has spent a fair bit of time going through an infinite seeming loop before finally unjamming itself.
I think this is part of the model’s success. It’s cheap enough that we’re all willing to let it run for extremely long times. It takes advantage of that by being tenacious. In my experience it will just keep trying things relentlessly until eventually something works.
The downside is that it’s more likely to arrive at a solution that solves the problem I asked but does it in a terribly hacky way. It reminds me of some of the junior devs I’ve worked with who trial and error their way into tests passing.
I frequently have to reset it and start it over with extra guidance. It’s not going to be touching any of my serious projects for these reasons but it’s fun to play with on the side.
Some of the early quants had issues with tool calling and looping. So you might want to check that you're running the latest version / recommended settings.
> and it's has spent a fair bit of time going through an infinite seeming loop before finally unjamming itself
I can live with this on my own hardware. Where Opus4.6 has developed this tendency to where it will happily chew through the entire 5-hour allowance on the first instruction going in endless circles. I’ve stopped using it for anything except the extreme planning now.
I don't know much about how these models are trained, but is this behavior intentional (ie, the people pulling the levers knew that this is how it would end up), or is it emergent (ie, pulling the levers to see what happens)?
Are you running it locally with llama.cpp? If so, is it working without any tweaking of the chat template? The tool calls fail for me when using the default chat template, however it seems to work a whole lot better with this: https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3.5-35B-A3B/discussions/9#69...
Yes, it fails too. I’m using the unsloth q4_km quant. Similarly fails with devstral2 small too, fixed that by using a similar template i found for it. Maybe it’s the quants that are broken, need to redownload I guess.
I'm getting ~30 tok/s on the A3B model with my 3070 Ti and 32k context.
> Do you feel you could replace the frontier models with it for everyday coding? Would/will you?
Probably not yet, but it's really good at composing shell commands. For scripting or one-liner generation, the A3B is really good. The web development skills are markedly better than Qwen's prior models in this parameter range, too.
In my experience Qwen3.5 is better even at smaller distillations. From what I understand the Qwen3-next series of models was just a test/preview of the architectural changes underpinning Qwen3.5. So Qwen3.5 is a more complete and well trained version of those models.
In my experience qwen 3 coder next is better. I ran quite a few tests yesterday and it was much better at utilizing tool calls properly and understanding complex code. For its size though 3.5 35B was very impressive. coder next is an 80b model so i think its just a size thing - also for whatever reason coder next is faster on my machine. Only model that is competitive in speed is GLM 4.7 flash
I use the term "harness" for those - or just "coding agent". I think orchestrator is more appropriate for systems that try to coordinate multiple agents running at the same time.
This terminology is still very much undefined though, so my version may not be the winning definition.
It's really easy to setup with any OpenAI compatible API and I self host Qwen Coder 3 Next on my personal MBP using LM Studio and just dial in from my work laptop with Zed and tailscale so i can connect from wherever i might be. It's able to do all sorts of things like run linting checks and tests and look for issues and refactor code and create files and things like this. I'm definitely still learning, but it's a pretty exciting jump from just talking to a chat bot and copying and pasting things manually.
It's the number of active parameters for a Mixture of Experts (misleading name IMO) model.
Qwen3.5-35B-A3B means that the model itself consists of 35 billion floating point numbers - very roughly 35GB of data - which are all loaded into memory at once.
But... on any given pass through the model weights only 3 billion of those parameters are "active" aka have matrix arithmetic applied against them.
This speeds up inference considerably because the computer has to do less operations for each token that is processed. It still needs the full amount of memory though as the 3B active it uses are likely different on every iteration.
It will benefit from a full amount of memory for sure, but AIUI if you use system memory and mmap for your experts you can execute the model with only enough memory for the active parameters, it's just unbearably slow since it has to swap in new experts for every token. So the more memory you have in excess to that, the more inactive but often-used experts can be kept in RAM for better performance.
There has been tension between Qwen's research team and Alibaba's product team, say the Qwen App. And recently, Alibaba tried to impose DAU as a KPI. It's understandable that a company like Alibaba would force a change of product strategy for any number of reasons. What puzzled me is why they would push out the key members of their research team. Didn't the industry have a shortage of model researchers and builders?
ICE has been detaining Chinese people in my area (and going door to door in at least one neighborhood where a lot of Chinese and Indians live). I was hearing about this just last week as word spread amongst the Chinese community here (Ohio) to make sure you have some legal documentation beyond just your driver's license on you at all times for protection. People will hear about this through the grapevine and it has a massive (and rightly so) chilling effect. US labs can try but with US government behaving like it is I don't think they will have much luck.
*edit: not that it matters, but since MAGA can't help but assume, these are all US citizens and green card holders that I am referring to.
The reality is - it doesn't matter. The fact that they have had as many false positives as they have and the way they treat people in general causes it to have rippling effects even for people who are legally here, or are considering legally immigrating.
The risk and level of publicity is just too high for many people to even consider, especially people already intelligent/capable enough to immigrate anywhere else that doesn't have these issues or stay in their own country.
Have they had a lot of false positives? Almost every story I see seems to fall apart on further investigation. To be clear, I'm sure they have some false positives, but do they have a lot of them relative to any other immigration system?
Depends, how are we defining "false positive"? Ex:
1. Detained the incorrect person
2. Detained the correct person, with the correct legal status
3. Detained the correct person, with the correct legal status, but in unlawful circumstances
4. Detained the correct person, with the correct legal status, in ostensibly-lawful circumstances, but in a way which is unconstitutional or crazy
An example of the final category are the immigrants that spent years being vetted, following the law, and doing expensive paperwork to be citizens. ICE snatched them when they showed up on at the last second as they were to take their citizenship oath. [0] Not because of anything they did, but because today's Republican party has decided that it's OK to hurt people based on their "shithole" country of birth.
These are all forms of false positives but the most popular news stories seem to be where they detain the correct person, correct legal status, lawfully, and the story happens to gloss over the facts about the legal status and focuses on the hardship. Yeah, it's a hardship to be split from your family, I can't deny that. But I'm not aware that most countries are very sympathetic to illegal immigrants.
If anything I find the stories featuring white/European people oddly racist because they seem to assume that I, the reader, will assume a white/European person couldn't possibly be in violation of immigration rules. But all the ones I've read turned out that they were indeed in violation of immigration rules.
Overall as a potential immigrant to the US myself, I find the process capricious and that US citizens by birth don't fully appreciate how painful it is or why it shouldn't be that way. But I don't find it notably worse or more onerous than the vast majority of immigration policies of other countries in practice.
I'm not sure what you're talking about. The most popular stories are the ones when they detain US citizens, rough them up, and then dump them on the side of the road somewhere without even apologizing.
"especially people already intelligent/capable enough to immigrate anywhere else that doesn't have these issues or stay in their own country" Isn't that the point? Come here legally or don't come at all.
Even if you're not likely to be deported from a foreign country, you wouldn't want to face frequent gang intimidation tactics, would you? Simply feeling threatened isn't fun, even if nothing truly terrible will happen to you (not to speak of the real risk in being detained regardless).
No, all of the specific cases I heard about were Chinese people that were naturalized citizens (some for decades) who were cuffed and detained for a few hours before being released. As others have said it doesn't really matter, though. It's the sentiment that counts.
This is FUD. The US has dumped truckloads of cash to make it likely that masked men with no cameras and little training will parade around abducting anyone they even suspect of being an illegal immigrant, after even Yale admitted it's likely that more than 22M+ people came here illegally. https://insights.som.yale.edu/insights/yale-study-finds-twic...
It'd be good if Congress could do something to remove the masks, put cameras on these agents, and for the local governments to stop fighting removal of all people who are here illegally so we can pretend we have borders again.
I feel like we would disagree on the role of immigration in the US but I really appreciate you calling out how the current administration’s approach is only effective at making viral clips online. Meta comment, but it’s refreshing to talk with people who have different goals while still referencing a shared reality. Removing the masks and adding cameras shouldn’t be controversial unless your goal really is to make a paramilitary force for the president.
Illegal immigration has been a political issue in the USA for a long time now. Trump is, however cruelly, fulfilling a campaign promise. One of the few he's managed to do.
The unstated but obvious (to me?) goal of what ICE is doing is not to get large numbers of people out of the country, but to drive costs down for migrant labor by further disenfranchising them, making them scared, marginal, etc.
If they actually thoroughly evicted non-status migrant workers they'd have a outright revolt on their hands from farmers and other businesses that depend on them.
Instead those businesses can now take further advantage of the fear of harassment and/or deportation to drive down compensation and rights.
Contrast with countries like Canada that have a legal temporary foreign agriculture worker program that provides a regulated source of seasonal migrant farm worker labour under a non-citizen temporary status, but with some rights (still often abused). It's notable to me as a Canadian that I don't see this being advocated on any large scale by either party in the US.
Anyways, all this just to say that the jackboot clown theater is the point, not a side effect.
Limiting the supply of migrant labor drives costs up, not down, and the ICE raids have had a significant negative effect on businesses reliant on illegal immigrants.
Do you have numbers on how many migrant farm workers have actually been deported or detained?
Because going around and harassing and deporting other or non-essential non-status immigrants would drive labor costs down because of the chill it would put through those who are grudgingly tolerated.
And besides, given the quality of personality ICE seems to be employing even (especially) at its highest levels, I simply assume there's corruption such that if I'm a large orchard or whatever I simply pay ICE to stay away.
"There was a significant drop-off in entries to the United States in 2025 relative to 2024 and an increase in enforcement activity leading to removals and voluntary departures. We estimate that net migration was between –10,000 and –295,000 in 2025, the first time in at least half a century it has been negative."
Honestly think it’s just a matter of resources and they would rather play theater for their leader than actually do the job. However, the effect has been felt.
Won't someone think of the poor tech millionaires' pools and their cleaning slaves? If we get rid of the slaves, they'll have to pay at first world cleaning rates! :(
They already kind of do, but I think anyone who was into US money has already left for it, and the money China is throwing at the problem is pretty good also. You can also have a lot more influence in a Chinese company without having to adopt a weird new American corporate culture.
Anthropic has gone out of their way to make a point about how much they love and admire the US state and its defense sector. Only drawing the line at a very far point and even when they drew the line it was with a big thing about how they believe in the American defense sector blah blah blah.
In any case, there's no way Anthropic's investors in Silicon Valley would countenance such a move.
Also, I'm biased the logical place is Canada, not Europe. Much of the fundamental/foundational research on LLMs, and a large part of the talent, came from universities in Canada anyways.
This US administration (or any admin) would almost certainly impose export controls on US AI technology before it would allow one of the frontier model providers to be acquired/relocate outside the US. It did the same thing when ASML wanted to acquire Cymer (California company that provides the EUV light source technology). The acquisition was only allowed under strict technology sharing/export agreements with the Dutch government.
Europe really just needs to rally behind Mistral. That's where they should dump their cash.
Can they actually prevent it though? In typical cases there would be IP licenses involved. But in this case it's a valuation based (AFAICT) on a team of people plus their infra. What happens if they all just happened to get hired by "AnthropicEU GmbH" a new entity which has been gifted hundreds of millions in computing resources?
I'm not sure goals are totally aligned though. The current models are created by enormous expense. We know that many stages are done incorrectly. I am confident that they can be replicated without any unique US knowledge.
At the moment my impression is instead that the issue is computational resources. It's important to stay near the frontier though, and to build up ones capacity to train large models.
Consequently I don't think we need Anthropic. It wouldn't be terrible if they came. Especially if they picked a nice location. Barcelona would be very nice, for example.
Given what Amodei thinks of spying non-US citizens, that's a hard pass from me. If you are that loyal (servile) to your country leaders, don't go elsewhere when you "discover" they are thugs. Put up with it or revolt (as Iranians are being asked to do).
China is also giving them dump trucks full of cash though. Plus you have to content with the nationalism reason (unfortunately this has died off in America for too many). The idea of building your country is valued for most Chinese I have met. Plus China is incredibly nice to live in, especially if you have lots of money and/or connections. So you can work in China, get paid lots of money, feel like you are doing good. Or In America you can get paid lots of money, and get yelled at by people online because the Government wants to use your model.
China city life is amazingly convenient. Trains and subways are just such an enormous quality of life boost. Add to that the relative cleanliness of having nearly zero homelessness and you’ve got something very compelling.
I will say we are winning in accessibility. China doesn’t have much of a ramp game
I wonder if you max out your options in China. It seems the Party is suspicious of ambition and high profile winners. I'm sure you can live comfortably, but there's a ceiling.
That’s not relevant to normal people. If you’re a billionaire with aspirations of power then it’s probably good there’s a ceiling. Sure beats having Elon randomly firing your public servants while high on ketamine.
Star athletes really hate being told they can't score more than 10 goals in a season because it's unfair to the other weaker players. The players will either leave to go play somewhere else, or they become weaker players themselves.
Why would a country want to welcome a psychopath whose goal is to make lots of money and wield political power that results from the money. I'm sure they would be happier with just as psychopathic people who make a bit less money but don't have aspirations of running the country from their secret bunker.
I got an offer out of the blue for a consulting gig in ML, offering USD 400/hr in China. Assuming this was legit (the offeror seemed legit), it looks like China is also throwing a lot of Benjamins around...
> I have no fear of calling the US President a pedo or saying Fuck the Police on my Twitter.
Does that matter? In China people don't judge the state of their civilization by how easily you can insult the police but whether you need to be afraid to meet them on the street.
It does tell us something though that the evaluation of American life is now being evaluated by parasocial interactions with the president on social media.
Oh, China absolutely does not tolerate _public_ dissent very much including highly visible social media posts. Everybody there knows that.
But this:
> According to the social credit system, Chinese citizens are punishable if they indulge in buying too many video games, buying too much junk food, having a friend online who has a low credit score, visiting unauthorized websites, posting “fake news” online, and more.
...is just pure bullshit. There were _ideas_ about including these kinds of stuff into the score, but they have never been implemented. At this point, the social credit score is only used to find people who dodge court decisions.
Please ignore the gun pointed at your head / social credit score / masked goons roving about Minnesota / etc as it hasn't been used against you at this point.
I would imagine if it isn't illegal its a very bad idea not to. But regardless, I would bet large amounts of money that you would never get any flack for doing anything for the government. If I went on X, Threads, Bluesky, TikTok and said "Hey I am a software engineer selling awesome new technology to the government and military!" I am going to get Americans attacking me for supporting Trump / ICE / FBI whatever the current issue of the day is. If I did the same on Douyin or Weibo the response would be able making China strong, and there would be no criticism of that choice.
Sure, but the difference is that while the Chinese state is measurably awful on all sorts of human rights things within their own borders... they're not currently dropping bombs on foreign cities, starving a neighbour of critical petroleum shipments, or heavily funding an ally to slowly exterminate a population.
My point is as a non-American I feel no allegiance to either state, and current events don't make me sympathetic to the geo-political aims of the USA. So I don't see a strong moral case for this tech being an especial purvey of either party.
If you'd asked me two years ago my answer might have been different.
And to the original point, yeah, I would feel entirely justified in the critique of engineers in providing tools to the US defense apparatus at this point.
At least the Chinese shops are giving their weights away for free, and not demanding that any government ban the rest.
Chinese people are very racist towards non-Chinese. It might seem like a happy utopia, but if you aren't Chinese, then you may not really enjoy your time there. It may not be quite as bad as being black in rural US south, but being black (or anything non-Chinese) in China is still not going to be a good time.
Have you experienced racism? In Japan atleast, it was evenly applied. That company won't rent to foreigners but this one will. That company won't hire foreigners but this one will. Police will bother you if you ride a bike, but they will be polite while they waste 10 minutes of your time asking for your gaijin card for biking while foreign.
In the US people try to hide it and are far more sinister about it, since there are a lot of laws against obvious racism. The cops are also happy in the US to just kill you.
The racism in the US comes out of hate where as what I experienced abroad was more, we don't think you'll fit in and follow the rules and you have to constantly prove that you can.
I didn't spend too much time in China so maybe it is a racist hell hole.
But my experience in Japan was that white immigrants were way more inclined to make a huge deal about the lighter racism they experienced because they had never been somewhere where their skin color was a disadvantage.
"we don't think you'll fit in and follow the rules and you have to constantly prove that you can"
I speculate that if you were a permanent minority instead of a visiting inconvenience, then that 'nice' racism you describe would metastasize into the type of racism you see in the USA. It's more friction from time and exposure added on. And, you know, slavery.
> get yelled at by people online because the Government wants to use your model
Well duh, as recently demonstrated, an US model used by the US gov will 100% end up murdering actual children sooner than later, in this case less than a calendar year in some far flung war that many Americans do not support. Alternatively PRC model used by CCP might kill in some hypothetical future but for national reunification/rejuvenation that many Chinese support. At the end of the day, researchers and population on one side sleeps more soundly.
I'm sure it's a very nice place to live if you're content to just stay quiet in society and never put a political sign in your yard or even just talk about the wrong thing with your friend in a WeChat.
This is an exaggeration. Nobody in China cares about what you speak with each other privately, and people talk about stupid policies all the time. The government cares about _public_ actions.
In practical terms, if you're not kind of person who would want to run for an office in the US, China is incredibly comfortable. Cities are safe, with barely any violent crime. Public drug use is nonexistent. And with the US-level AI researcher income, you'd be in the top 0.1% earners.
> nobody in China cares about what you speak with each other privately, and people talk about stupid policies all the time. The government cares about _public_ actions.
My comment and the linked video says otherwise. The guy was in a private group chat and said some nasty things about the police for confiscating his motorcycle. Now he's arrested and in the Tiger Chair.
Group with 75 people. That's a crowd, doesn't matter if gated behind QR code invites. Shit talk cops and gov with the bois is fine. Shit talk / soapbox in a crowd (virtual or real) and get caught or reported = drink tea on the menu.
Sigh. Let's not invent things? You can protest anything in the US just fine, with generally no consequences. Heck, our local _high_ _school_ students go out and protest everything to weasel out of classes.
Let's just clarify that visitors don't have the same rights as citizens. Whether or not you agree with the current administration's policies hopefully we can agree that it is entirely reasonable for them to deport foreign political dissidents more or less at their discretion.
If you want to put this to the test try crossing the Canadian border and when they ask you the purpose of your visit respond that it's to attend a protest.
It just looks a bit ridiculous when students walk out in protest against things that are far outside the influence of their school, city, or even state.
Well, the problem aren't just the NSF funding cuts. Everyone else is already dumping truckloads of cash. There's also the public health situation (who wants measles or polio?), the risk of retaliatory attacks from the countries we're at war with, etc. You could write paragraphs about why the US is less attractive to researchers.
When I was a deep learning PhD in the first Trump administration, US universities were already very deeply affected by the Muslim ban, and so a lot of talent ended up in other countries.
Sibling commentators are rightfully pointing out that foreigners, especially those who would not be recognized as white, face an onerous and risky customs process with long-term and increasing risks of deportation. When you see a headline like the NIST labs abruptly restricting foreign scientists, _everything_ else feels uncertain. Even if someone doesn't believe they're personally at risk for deportation, they're still seeing everything else.
And then it all boils down to a reputational thing. The era where we were the top choice for research is in the past. If you start a PhD in the US on your resume during this era, you might be anticipating how you'll answe the question of why you weren't good enough to get accepted somewhere better.
They probably have tried, but you have to have more cash than those researchers feel they can get starting their own lab. When you consider the fact that their new startup lab would have the entire nation of China as, in effect, a captive market; you start to see how almost any amount of money would be too little to convince them not to make a run at that new startup. If money is their aim.
I think Alibaba needs to just give these guys a blank check. Let them fill it in themselves. Absent that, I'm pretty sure they'll make their own startup.
I do think it'd be a big loss for the rest of the world though if they close whatever model their startup comes up with.
Been running the 32B locally for a few days and honestly surprised how well it handles agentic coding stuff. Definitely punches above its weight. Only complaint is it sometimes decides to ignore half your prompt when instructions get long, but at this size I guess thats the tradeoff.
One thing I’ve noticed with local models is that people tolerate a lot more trial and error behavior. When a hosted model wastes tokens it feels expensive, but when a local model loops a bit it just feels like it’s “thinking.”
If models like Qwen can get good enough for coding tasks locally, the real shift might be economic rather than purely capability.
Wasted tokens are preferred for local models, I need the GPU mainframe in my bedroom to heat it as I live in a third world country with unreliable heating (Switzerland).
Getting a bit of whiplash goin from AI is replacing people, to AI is dead without (these specific) people. Surely we're far enough ahead that AI can take it from here?
Anthropic also fires off the alarm bells seemingly at any sign of issue. I've personally only noticed an outage once, and the status page wasn't even showing it as down at that time. It eventually did update about 45 minutes later, then I was back up and running another 15 minutes later but the "outage" on the status page stayed up for another hour or so.
Probably good to sent alerts early, but they might be going a bit too early.
I would second that Qwen3.5 is exceptionally good. In a calibration, it (35b variant) was running locally with Ada NextGen 24GB to do the same things with easy-llm-cli in comparison with gemini-cli + Gemini 3 Pro, they were at par … really impressive it ran pretty fast …
I tried the new qwen model in Codex CLI and in Roo Code and I found it to be pretty bad. For instance I told it I wanted a new vite app and it just started writing all the files from scratch (which didn’t work) rather than using the vite CLI tool.
Is there a better agentic coding harness people are using for these models? Based on my experience I can definitely believe the claims that these models are overfit to Evals and not broadly capable.
I've noticed that open weight models tend to hesitate to use tools or commands unless they appeared often in the training or you tell them very explicitly to do so in your AGENTS.md or prompt.
They also struggle at translating very broad requirements to a set of steps that I find acceptable. Planning helps a lot.
Regarding the harness, I have no idea how much they differ but I seem to have more luck with https://pi.dev than OpenCode. I think the minimalism of Pi meshes better with the limited capabilities of open models.
+1 to this, anecdotally I’ve found in my own evaluations that if your system prompt doesn’t explicitly declare how to invoke a tool and e.g. describe what each tool does, most models I’ve tried fail to call tools or will try to call them but not necessarily use the right format. With the right prompt meanwhile, even weak models shoot up in eval accuracy.
Have frontier lab do the plan which is the most time consuming part anyways and then local llm do the implementation.
Frontier model can orchestrate your tickets, write a plan for them and dispatch local llm agents to implement at about 180 tokens/s, vllm can probably ,manage something like 25 concurrent sessions on RTX 6000
Do it all in a worktrees and then have frontier model do the review and merge.
I am just a retired hobbyist but that's my approach, I run everything through gitea issues, each issue gets launched by orchestrator in a new tmux window and two main agents (implementer and reviewer get their own panes so I can see what's going on). I think claude code now has this aspect also somewhat streamlined but I have seen no need to change up my approach yet since I am just a retired hobbyist tinkering on my personal projects. Also right now I just use claude code subagents but have been thinking of trying to replace them with some of these Qwen 3.5 models because they do seem cpable and I have the hardware to run them.
In my experience Qwen3.5/Qwen3-Coder-Next perform best in their own harness, Qwen-Code. You can also crib the system prompt and tool definitions from there though. Though caveat, despite the Qwen models being the state of the art for local models they are like a year behind anything you can pay for commercially so asking for it to build a new app from scratch might be a bit much.
I wonder if an american company poached one/all of them. They've been pretty much bleeding edge of open models and would not surprise me if Amazon or Google snatched them up
Yep. The 9B has excellent image recognition. I showed it a PCB photo and it correctly identified all components and the board type from part numbers and shape. OCR quality was solid.
Tool calling with opencode worked without issues, but general coding ability is still far from sonnet-tier. Asked it to add a feature to an existing react app, it couldn't produce an error-free build and fell into a delete-redo loop. Even when I fixed the errors, the UI looked really bad. A more explicit prompt probably would have helped. Opus one-shotted it, same prompt, the component looked exactly as expected.
But I'll be running this locally for note summarization, code review, and OCR. Very coherent for its size.
It sounds like the lead was demoted to attract new talent, quit as a result, and the rest of the team also resigned to force management to change their minds.
If so, I'm happy that the team held together, and I hope that endogenous tech leads get to control their own career and tech destiny after hard work leads to great products. (It's almost as inspiring as tank man, and the tank commanders who tried to avoid harming him...)
(ducking the downvote for challenging the primacy of equity...)
More likely some high ranking party member's nepobaby from Gemini sniffed success with Qwen and the original folks just walked away as their reward disappeared.
There is no source. But the party in China does have ultimate control.
There would never be an Anthropic/Pentagon situation in China, because in China there isn't actually separation between the military and any given AI company. The party is fully in control.
apples v.s. oranges. The later is true, Emad did get sabotaged (for not being able to raise money in time, about 8-month before he's leaving). Junyang didn't have that long arc of incidents.
What Anthropic was complaining about is training on mass-elicited chat logs. It is very much a ToS violation (you aren't allowed to exploit the service for the purpose of building a competitor) so the complaint is well-founded but (1) it's not "distillation" properly understood; it can only feasibly extract the same kind of narrow knowledge you'd read out from chat logs, perhaps including primitive "let's think step by step" output (which are not true fine-tuned reasoning tokens); because you have no access to the actual weights; and (2) it's something Western AI firms are very much believed to do to one another and to Chinese models all the time anyway. Hence the brouhaha about Western models claiming to be DeepSeek when they answer in Chinese.
So they're paying expensive input tokens to extract at best a tiny amount of information ("judgment") per request? That's even less like "distillation" than the other claim of them trying to figure out reasoning by asking the model to think step by step.
I really hope this doesn't hinder development too much. As Simon says, Qwen3.5 is very impressive.
I've been testing Qwen3.5-35B-A3B over the past couple of days and it's a very impressive model. It's the most capable agentic coding model I've tested at that size by far. I've had it writing Rust and Elixir via the Pi harness and found that it's very capable of handling well defined tasks with minimal steering from me. I tell it to write tests and it writes sane ones ensuring they pass without cheating. It handles the loop of responding to test and compiler errors while pushing towards its goal very well.
I've been playing with 3.5:122b on a GH200 the past few days for rust/react/ts, and while it's clearly sub-Sonnet, with tight descriptions it can get small-medium tasks done OK - as well as Sonnet if the scope is small.
The main quirk I've found is that it has a tendency to decide halfway through following my detailed instructions that it would be "simpler" to just... not do what I asked, and I find it has stripped all the preliminary support infrastructure for the new feature out of the code.
> to decide halfway through following my detailed instructions that it would be "simpler" to just... not do what I asked
That's likely coming from the 3:1 ratio of linear to quadratic attention usage. The latest DeepSeek also suffers from it which the original R1 never exhibited.
That sounds awfully similar to what Opus 4.6 does on my tasks sometimes.
> Blah blah blah (second guesses its own reasoning half a dozen times then goes). Actually, it would be a simpler to just ...
Specifically on Antigravity, I've noticed it doing that trying to "save time" to stay within some artificial deadline.
It might have something to do with the system messages and the reinforcement/realignment messages that are interwoven into the context (but never displayed to end-users) to keep the agents on task.
Yeah that happened to me with Claude code opus 4.6 1M for the first time today. I had to check the model hadn’t changed. It was weird. I was imagining that maybe anthropic have a way of deciding how much resource a user actually gets and they had downgraded me suddenly or something.
Claude Code recently downgraded the default thinking level to “medium”, so it’s worth checking your settings.
> that it would be "simpler" to just... not do what I asked
That sounds too close to what I feel on some days xD
Turn down the temperature and you’ll see less “simpler” short cuts.
For the uninitiated: Interestingly, it is not advisable to take this to the extreme and set temperature to 0.
That would seem logical, as the results are then completely deterministic, but it turns out that a suboptimal token may result in a better answer in the long run. Also, allowing for a little bit of noise gives the model room to talk itself out of a suboptimal path.
I like to think of this like tempering the output space. With a temperature of zero, there is only one possible output and it may be completely wrong. With even a low temperature, you drastically increase the chances that the output space contains a correct answer, through containing multiple responses rather than only one.
I wonder if determinism will be less harmful to diffusion models because they perform multiple iterations over the response rather than having only a single shot at each position that lacks lookahead. I'm looking forward to finding out and have been playing with a diffusion model locally for a few days.
Yup. I think of it as how off the rails do you want to explore?
For creative things or exploratory reasoning, a temperature of 0.8 lends us to all sorts of excursions down the rabbit hole. However, when coding and needing something precise, a temperature of 0.2 is what I use. If I don’t like the output, I’ll rephrase or add context.
> The main quirk I've found is that it has a tendency to decide halfway through following my detailed instructions that it would be "simpler" to just... not do what I asked,
This is my experience with the Qwen3-Next and Qwen3.5 models, too.
I can prompt with strict instructions saying "** DO NOT..." and it follows them for a few iterations. Then it has a realization that it would be simpler to just do the thing I told it not to do, which leads it to the dead end I was trying to avoid.
I've been testing the same with some rust, and it's has spent a fair bit of time going through an infinite seeming loop before finally unjamming itself. It seems a little more likely to jam up than some other models I've experimented with.
It's also driving itself crazy with deadpool & deadpool-r2d2 that it chose during planning phase.
That said, it does seem to be doing a very good job in general, the code it has created is mostly sane other than this fuss over the database layer, which I suspect I'll have to intervene on. It's certainly doing a better job than other models I'm able to self-host so far.
> it's has spent a fair bit of time going through an infinite seeming loop before finally unjamming itself.
I think this is part of the model’s success. It’s cheap enough that we’re all willing to let it run for extremely long times. It takes advantage of that by being tenacious. In my experience it will just keep trying things relentlessly until eventually something works.
The downside is that it’s more likely to arrive at a solution that solves the problem I asked but does it in a terribly hacky way. It reminds me of some of the junior devs I’ve worked with who trial and error their way into tests passing.
I frequently have to reset it and start it over with extra guidance. It’s not going to be touching any of my serious projects for these reasons but it’s fun to play with on the side.
Some of the early quants had issues with tool calling and looping. So you might want to check that you're running the latest version / recommended settings.
> and it's has spent a fair bit of time going through an infinite seeming loop before finally unjamming itself
I can live with this on my own hardware. Where Opus4.6 has developed this tendency to where it will happily chew through the entire 5-hour allowance on the first instruction going in endless circles. I’ve stopped using it for anything except the extreme planning now.
I don't know much about how these models are trained, but is this behavior intentional (ie, the people pulling the levers knew that this is how it would end up), or is it emergent (ie, pulling the levers to see what happens)?
I've had even better results using the dense 27B model -- less looping and churning on problems
Are you running it locally with llama.cpp? If so, is it working without any tweaking of the chat template? The tool calls fail for me when using the default chat template, however it seems to work a whole lot better with this: https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3.5-35B-A3B/discussions/9#69...
Have you tried the '--jinja' flag in llama-server?
Yes, it fails too. I’m using the unsloth q4_km quant. Similarly fails with devstral2 small too, fixed that by using a similar template i found for it. Maybe it’s the quants that are broken, need to redownload I guess.
What hardware do you have it running on? Do you feel you could replace the frontier models with it for everyday coding? Would/will you?
Around 20ish tokens a second with 6-bit quant at very long context lengths on my AMD AI Max 395+
I’m trying to use local models whenever possible. Still need to lean on the frontier models sometimes.
60 to 70 on a 5080, but only tinkering for now. The smaller models seem exceptionally good for what they are, and some can even do OCR reliably.
I'm getting ~30 tok/s on the A3B model with my 3070 Ti and 32k context.
> Do you feel you could replace the frontier models with it for everyday coding? Would/will you?
Probably not yet, but it's really good at composing shell commands. For scripting or one-liner generation, the A3B is really good. The web development skills are markedly better than Qwen's prior models in this parameter range, too.
What hardware are you running this on?
what's your take between Qwen3.5-35B-A3B and Qwen3-Coder-Next?
In my experience Qwen3.5 is better even at smaller distillations. From what I understand the Qwen3-next series of models was just a test/preview of the architectural changes underpinning Qwen3.5. So Qwen3.5 is a more complete and well trained version of those models.
In my experience qwen 3 coder next is better. I ran quite a few tests yesterday and it was much better at utilizing tool calls properly and understanding complex code. For its size though 3.5 35B was very impressive. coder next is an 80b model so i think its just a size thing - also for whatever reason coder next is faster on my machine. Only model that is competitive in speed is GLM 4.7 flash
What do you use as the orchestrator? By this I mean opencode, or the like. Is that the right term?
Another vote in favour of "harness".
I'm aligning on Agent for the combination of harness + model + context history (so after you fork an agent you now have two distinct agents)
And orchestrator means the system to run multiple agents together.
I use the term "harness" for those - or just "coding agent". I think orchestrator is more appropriate for systems that try to coordinate multiple agents running at the same time.
This terminology is still very much undefined though, so my version may not be the winning definition.
I'm basically using the agentic features of the Zed editor: https://zed.dev/agentic
It's really easy to setup with any OpenAI compatible API and I self host Qwen Coder 3 Next on my personal MBP using LM Studio and just dial in from my work laptop with Zed and tailscale so i can connect from wherever i might be. It's able to do all sorts of things like run linting checks and tests and look for issues and refactor code and create files and things like this. I'm definitely still learning, but it's a pretty exciting jump from just talking to a chat bot and copying and pasting things manually.
We don't have a Qwen3.5-Coder to compare with, but there is a chart comparing Qwen3.5 to Qwen3 including Qwen3-Next[0].
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1rivckt/visuali...
What is the meaning of 'A3B'?
It's the number of active parameters for a Mixture of Experts (misleading name IMO) model.
Qwen3.5-35B-A3B means that the model itself consists of 35 billion floating point numbers - very roughly 35GB of data - which are all loaded into memory at once.
But... on any given pass through the model weights only 3 billion of those parameters are "active" aka have matrix arithmetic applied against them.
This speeds up inference considerably because the computer has to do less operations for each token that is processed. It still needs the full amount of memory though as the 3B active it uses are likely different on every iteration.
It will benefit from a full amount of memory for sure, but AIUI if you use system memory and mmap for your experts you can execute the model with only enough memory for the active parameters, it's just unbearably slow since it has to swap in new experts for every token. So the more memory you have in excess to that, the more inactive but often-used experts can be kept in RAM for better performance.
There has been tension between Qwen's research team and Alibaba's product team, say the Qwen App. And recently, Alibaba tried to impose DAU as a KPI. It's understandable that a company like Alibaba would force a change of product strategy for any number of reasons. What puzzled me is why they would push out the key members of their research team. Didn't the industry have a shortage of model researchers and builders?
Perhaps they wanted future Qwen models to be closed and proprietary, and the authors couldn't abide by that.
I wonder how a US lab hasn't dumped truckloads of cash into various laps to ensure these researchers have a place at their lab
ICE has been detaining Chinese people in my area (and going door to door in at least one neighborhood where a lot of Chinese and Indians live). I was hearing about this just last week as word spread amongst the Chinese community here (Ohio) to make sure you have some legal documentation beyond just your driver's license on you at all times for protection. People will hear about this through the grapevine and it has a massive (and rightly so) chilling effect. US labs can try but with US government behaving like it is I don't think they will have much luck.
*edit: not that it matters, but since MAGA can't help but assume, these are all US citizens and green card holders that I am referring to.
Yeah, the Hyundai factory fiasco kind of dashed the idea that the enforcement would spare people working in favored industries setting up in the US.
The Hyundai factory "enforcement" wasn't even legal. Those workers were here to train US workers and the Hyundai employees had proper visas for this.
https://apnews.com/article/immigration-raid-hyundai-korea-ic...
https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/foreignaffairs/20251112/hundred...
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/attorney-says-detained-k...
The regime is powered by racism and doesn't think through things.
"Papers, please." comes to the US of A.
Are the people being detained in the country illegally?
The reality is - it doesn't matter. The fact that they have had as many false positives as they have and the way they treat people in general causes it to have rippling effects even for people who are legally here, or are considering legally immigrating.
The risk and level of publicity is just too high for many people to even consider, especially people already intelligent/capable enough to immigrate anywhere else that doesn't have these issues or stay in their own country.
Have they had a lot of false positives? Almost every story I see seems to fall apart on further investigation. To be clear, I'm sure they have some false positives, but do they have a lot of them relative to any other immigration system?
Depends, how are we defining "false positive"? Ex:
1. Detained the incorrect person
2. Detained the correct person, with the correct legal status
3. Detained the correct person, with the correct legal status, but in unlawful circumstances
4. Detained the correct person, with the correct legal status, in ostensibly-lawful circumstances, but in a way which is unconstitutional or crazy
An example of the final category are the immigrants that spent years being vetted, following the law, and doing expensive paperwork to be citizens. ICE snatched them when they showed up on at the last second as they were to take their citizenship oath. [0] Not because of anything they did, but because today's Republican party has decided that it's OK to hurt people based on their "shithole" country of birth.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/30/us-citizensh...
These are all forms of false positives but the most popular news stories seem to be where they detain the correct person, correct legal status, lawfully, and the story happens to gloss over the facts about the legal status and focuses on the hardship. Yeah, it's a hardship to be split from your family, I can't deny that. But I'm not aware that most countries are very sympathetic to illegal immigrants.
If anything I find the stories featuring white/European people oddly racist because they seem to assume that I, the reader, will assume a white/European person couldn't possibly be in violation of immigration rules. But all the ones I've read turned out that they were indeed in violation of immigration rules.
Overall as a potential immigrant to the US myself, I find the process capricious and that US citizens by birth don't fully appreciate how painful it is or why it shouldn't be that way. But I don't find it notably worse or more onerous than the vast majority of immigration policies of other countries in practice.
I'm not sure what you're talking about. The most popular stories are the ones when they detain US citizens, rough them up, and then dump them on the side of the road somewhere without even apologizing.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/13/ice-immigrat...
[2] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/a-u-s-citizen-says-ice-f...
[3] https://www.propublica.org/article/immigration-dhs-american-...
"especially people already intelligent/capable enough to immigrate anywhere else that doesn't have these issues or stay in their own country" Isn't that the point? Come here legally or don't come at all.
The "legally" part is redefined on the whims of a dictator on a weekly basis.
Even if you're not likely to be deported from a foreign country, you wouldn't want to face frequent gang intimidation tactics, would you? Simply feeling threatened isn't fun, even if nothing truly terrible will happen to you (not to speak of the real risk in being detained regardless).
No, all of the specific cases I heard about were Chinese people that were naturalized citizens (some for decades) who were cuffed and detained for a few hours before being released. As others have said it doesn't really matter, though. It's the sentiment that counts.
Sometimes, often times no. They have detained multiple US citizens.
Who cares when you get a bonus per person either way?
Yes. Yes, so true. And the phd types building these models are probably even scared in China that ICE will fly there to deport them.
This thread is about bringing these people to the US.
What the US has done is dumped truckloads of cash to make it likely that as a legal immigrant you will be abducted and sent to a camp.
This is FUD. The US has dumped truckloads of cash to make it likely that masked men with no cameras and little training will parade around abducting anyone they even suspect of being an illegal immigrant, after even Yale admitted it's likely that more than 22M+ people came here illegally. https://insights.som.yale.edu/insights/yale-study-finds-twic...
It'd be good if Congress could do something to remove the masks, put cameras on these agents, and for the local governments to stop fighting removal of all people who are here illegally so we can pretend we have borders again.
I feel like we would disagree on the role of immigration in the US but I really appreciate you calling out how the current administration’s approach is only effective at making viral clips online. Meta comment, but it’s refreshing to talk with people who have different goals while still referencing a shared reality. Removing the masks and adding cameras shouldn’t be controversial unless your goal really is to make a paramilitary force for the president.
Making viral clips is exactly what they want.
Their goal is for every one person violently detained, 10 decide to leave on their own, and 100 decide to not come in the first place.
"Goal" implies there's a plan instead of just wanton cruelty for the sake of cruelty.
Illegal immigration has been a political issue in the USA for a long time now. Trump is, however cruelly, fulfilling a campaign promise. One of the few he's managed to do.
The unstated but obvious (to me?) goal of what ICE is doing is not to get large numbers of people out of the country, but to drive costs down for migrant labor by further disenfranchising them, making them scared, marginal, etc.
If they actually thoroughly evicted non-status migrant workers they'd have a outright revolt on their hands from farmers and other businesses that depend on them.
Instead those businesses can now take further advantage of the fear of harassment and/or deportation to drive down compensation and rights.
Contrast with countries like Canada that have a legal temporary foreign agriculture worker program that provides a regulated source of seasonal migrant farm worker labour under a non-citizen temporary status, but with some rights (still often abused). It's notable to me as a Canadian that I don't see this being advocated on any large scale by either party in the US.
Anyways, all this just to say that the jackboot clown theater is the point, not a side effect.
Limiting the supply of migrant labor drives costs up, not down, and the ICE raids have had a significant negative effect on businesses reliant on illegal immigrants.
Do you have numbers on how many migrant farm workers have actually been deported or detained?
Because going around and harassing and deporting other or non-essential non-status immigrants would drive labor costs down because of the chill it would put through those who are grudgingly tolerated.
And besides, given the quality of personality ICE seems to be employing even (especially) at its highest levels, I simply assume there's corruption such that if I'm a large orchard or whatever I simply pay ICE to stay away.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/macroeconomic-implication...
"There was a significant drop-off in entries to the United States in 2025 relative to 2024 and an increase in enforcement activity leading to removals and voluntary departures. We estimate that net migration was between –10,000 and –295,000 in 2025, the first time in at least half a century it has been negative."
They do have a revolt on their hands from farmers… go watch some of their pleas for help.
It's nothing like it would be if ICE was actually doing substantially more than fascist theater.
There'd be no food on the tables, frankly. And people in Silicon Valley would have messy houses and algae in their pools.
Honestly think it’s just a matter of resources and they would rather play theater for their leader than actually do the job. However, the effect has been felt.
Soybean farmers are screwed.
Won't someone think of the poor tech millionaires' pools and their cleaning slaves? If we get rid of the slaves, they'll have to pay at first world cleaning rates! :(
They already kind of do, but I think anyone who was into US money has already left for it, and the money China is throwing at the problem is pretty good also. You can also have a lot more influence in a Chinese company without having to adopt a weird new American corporate culture.
Indeed; or, Europe badly needs a competitive model to hedge against US political nonsense.
Offering „You are welcome“ relocation package to Anthropic might be a good idea.
Anthropic has gone out of their way to make a point about how much they love and admire the US state and its defense sector. Only drawing the line at a very far point and even when they drew the line it was with a big thing about how they believe in the American defense sector blah blah blah.
In any case, there's no way Anthropic's investors in Silicon Valley would countenance such a move.
Also, I'm biased the logical place is Canada, not Europe. Much of the fundamental/foundational research on LLMs, and a large part of the talent, came from universities in Canada anyways.
Given how American govt. has treated Anthropic, I think you might be right. EU truly has a remarkable opportunity to make Anthropic/Claude European.
This US administration (or any admin) would almost certainly impose export controls on US AI technology before it would allow one of the frontier model providers to be acquired/relocate outside the US. It did the same thing when ASML wanted to acquire Cymer (California company that provides the EUV light source technology). The acquisition was only allowed under strict technology sharing/export agreements with the Dutch government.
Europe really just needs to rally behind Mistral. That's where they should dump their cash.
Can they actually prevent it though? In typical cases there would be IP licenses involved. But in this case it's a valuation based (AFAICT) on a team of people plus their infra. What happens if they all just happened to get hired by "AnthropicEU GmbH" a new entity which has been gifted hundreds of millions in computing resources?
Having one „champion“ is flawed European approach. We need local competition and headhunting to make it fly.
Hard to compete in an environment that’s anti-996 and the pay is so much less.
I'm not sure goals are totally aligned though. The current models are created by enormous expense. We know that many stages are done incorrectly. I am confident that they can be replicated without any unique US knowledge.
At the moment my impression is instead that the issue is computational resources. It's important to stay near the frontier though, and to build up ones capacity to train large models.
Consequently I don't think we need Anthropic. It wouldn't be terrible if they came. Especially if they picked a nice location. Barcelona would be very nice, for example.
Given what Amodei thinks of spying non-US citizens, that's a hard pass from me. If you are that loyal (servile) to your country leaders, don't go elsewhere when you "discover" they are thugs. Put up with it or revolt (as Iranians are being asked to do).
It'd be great if they went to Mistral!
Competitive models are illegal in the EU.
China is also giving them dump trucks full of cash though. Plus you have to content with the nationalism reason (unfortunately this has died off in America for too many). The idea of building your country is valued for most Chinese I have met. Plus China is incredibly nice to live in, especially if you have lots of money and/or connections. So you can work in China, get paid lots of money, feel like you are doing good. Or In America you can get paid lots of money, and get yelled at by people online because the Government wants to use your model.
China city life is amazingly convenient. Trains and subways are just such an enormous quality of life boost. Add to that the relative cleanliness of having nearly zero homelessness and you’ve got something very compelling.
I will say we are winning in accessibility. China doesn’t have much of a ramp game
All very true.
I wonder if you max out your options in China. It seems the Party is suspicious of ambition and high profile winners. I'm sure you can live comfortably, but there's a ceiling.
That’s not relevant to normal people. If you’re a billionaire with aspirations of power then it’s probably good there’s a ceiling. Sure beats having Elon randomly firing your public servants while high on ketamine.
what is the issue with having a ceiling?
Star athletes really hate being told they can't score more than 10 goals in a season because it's unfair to the other weaker players. The players will either leave to go play somewhere else, or they become weaker players themselves.
Why would a country want to welcome a psychopath whose goal is to make lots of money and wield political power that results from the money. I'm sure they would be happier with just as psychopathic people who make a bit less money but don't have aspirations of running the country from their secret bunker.
wowsa - wasn't expecting star athletes and sports to enter this conversation... wild!
I got an offer out of the blue for a consulting gig in ML, offering USD 400/hr in China. Assuming this was legit (the offeror seemed legit), it looks like China is also throwing a lot of Benjamins around...
> Or In America you can get paid lots of money, and get yelled at by people online because the Government wants to use your model.
Isn't it just straight-up illegal in China to refuse the government from using your model? USA isn't perfect, but at least it has active discourse.
At least it has been decades since China Gov bombed innocent people in other countries. A peaceful and responsible government.
> A peaceful and responsible government.
People in Hong Kong died. Over 10,000 were arrested and many are still in prison. The rest are permanently disgraced in their social-credit society.
Again, USA is not perfect, but let's not dream up some fantasy about the CCP.
This "social credit" thing is dead in China.
As an American, I have no fear of calling the US President a pedo or saying Fuck the Police on my Twitter. Not the case in China. It's horrifying.
https://reclaimthenet.org/china-man-chair-interrogation-soci...
> I have no fear of calling the US President a pedo or saying Fuck the Police on my Twitter.
Does that matter? In China people don't judge the state of their civilization by how easily you can insult the police but whether you need to be afraid to meet them on the street.
It does tell us something though that the evaluation of American life is now being evaluated by parasocial interactions with the president on social media.
Oh, China absolutely does not tolerate _public_ dissent very much including highly visible social media posts. Everybody there knows that.
But this:
> According to the social credit system, Chinese citizens are punishable if they indulge in buying too many video games, buying too much junk food, having a friend online who has a low credit score, visiting unauthorized websites, posting “fake news” online, and more.
...is just pure bullshit. There were _ideas_ about including these kinds of stuff into the score, but they have never been implemented. At this point, the social credit score is only used to find people who dodge court decisions.
"At this point" being the key phrase.
A key phrase that can be used to speculate about whatever bs one can think of.
A low effort and bad faith rebuttal on your part.
Please ignore the gun pointed at your head / social credit score / masked goons roving about Minnesota / etc as it hasn't been used against you at this point.
What's ironic is that China is desperately trying to be that country, but the US has then in a geographic/geopolitical choke hold.
I would imagine if it isn't illegal its a very bad idea not to. But regardless, I would bet large amounts of money that you would never get any flack for doing anything for the government. If I went on X, Threads, Bluesky, TikTok and said "Hey I am a software engineer selling awesome new technology to the government and military!" I am going to get Americans attacking me for supporting Trump / ICE / FBI whatever the current issue of the day is. If I did the same on Douyin or Weibo the response would be able making China strong, and there would be no criticism of that choice.
Sure, but the difference is that while the Chinese state is measurably awful on all sorts of human rights things within their own borders... they're not currently dropping bombs on foreign cities, starving a neighbour of critical petroleum shipments, or heavily funding an ally to slowly exterminate a population.
What point are you trying to make here? Are government abuses somehow inherently better or worse depending on where they happen?
Do you imagine an invasion of Taiwan won't involve dropping bombs?
I feel like we should be able to agree that providing authoritarian regimes with high tech tools is immoral in the general case.
My point is as a non-American I feel no allegiance to either state, and current events don't make me sympathetic to the geo-political aims of the USA. So I don't see a strong moral case for this tech being an especial purvey of either party.
If you'd asked me two years ago my answer might have been different.
And to the original point, yeah, I would feel entirely justified in the critique of engineers in providing tools to the US defense apparatus at this point.
At least the Chinese shops are giving their weights away for free, and not demanding that any government ban the rest.
Chinese people are very racist towards non-Chinese. It might seem like a happy utopia, but if you aren't Chinese, then you may not really enjoy your time there. It may not be quite as bad as being black in rural US south, but being black (or anything non-Chinese) in China is still not going to be a good time.
Racism in even the worse parts of America doesn't even begin to touch the racism present in monocultural/monoracial countries.
Have you experienced racism? In Japan atleast, it was evenly applied. That company won't rent to foreigners but this one will. That company won't hire foreigners but this one will. Police will bother you if you ride a bike, but they will be polite while they waste 10 minutes of your time asking for your gaijin card for biking while foreign.
In the US people try to hide it and are far more sinister about it, since there are a lot of laws against obvious racism. The cops are also happy in the US to just kill you.
The racism in the US comes out of hate where as what I experienced abroad was more, we don't think you'll fit in and follow the rules and you have to constantly prove that you can.
I didn't spend too much time in China so maybe it is a racist hell hole.
But my experience in Japan was that white immigrants were way more inclined to make a huge deal about the lighter racism they experienced because they had never been somewhere where their skin color was a disadvantage.
This is a weird argument. Japanese racism is fine because the Japanese are polite and apply it evenly?
Despite what some on this site will argue, racism is always bad.
"we don't think you'll fit in and follow the rules and you have to constantly prove that you can"
I speculate that if you were a permanent minority instead of a visiting inconvenience, then that 'nice' racism you describe would metastasize into the type of racism you see in the USA. It's more friction from time and exposure added on. And, you know, slavery.
What do you mean by racist? I'm a white/hispanic American and spent 3 months in China and didn't really notice anything problematic towards me.
Wild to call 1.42 billion people racist despite having met very few of them.
> get yelled at by people online because the Government wants to use your model
Well duh, as recently demonstrated, an US model used by the US gov will 100% end up murdering actual children sooner than later, in this case less than a calendar year in some far flung war that many Americans do not support. Alternatively PRC model used by CCP might kill in some hypothetical future but for national reunification/rejuvenation that many Chinese support. At the end of the day, researchers and population on one side sleeps more soundly.
> China is incredibly nice to live in
I'm sure it's a very nice place to live if you're content to just stay quiet in society and never put a political sign in your yard or even just talk about the wrong thing with your friend in a WeChat.
This is an exaggeration. Nobody in China cares about what you speak with each other privately, and people talk about stupid policies all the time. The government cares about _public_ actions.
In practical terms, if you're not kind of person who would want to run for an office in the US, China is incredibly comfortable. Cities are safe, with barely any violent crime. Public drug use is nonexistent. And with the US-level AI researcher income, you'd be in the top 0.1% earners.
> nobody in China cares about what you speak with each other privately, and people talk about stupid policies all the time. The government cares about _public_ actions.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47252833
My comment and the linked video says otherwise. The guy was in a private group chat and said some nasty things about the police for confiscating his motorcycle. Now he's arrested and in the Tiger Chair.
How are we explaining this?
Group with 75 people. That's a crowd, doesn't matter if gated behind QR code invites. Shit talk cops and gov with the bois is fine. Shit talk / soapbox in a crowd (virtual or real) and get caught or reported = drink tea on the menu.
try to protest in america and see how that works out for you long-term. or say protest against genocide in gaza at an uni or generally in public…
Sigh. Let's not invent things? You can protest anything in the US just fine, with generally no consequences. Heck, our local _high_ _school_ students go out and protest everything to weasel out of classes.
Trump admin did put people in prison and then deported them, for doing nothing more than protesting.
Not as bad as China sure, but not as good as other civilized nations.
Let's just clarify that visitors don't have the same rights as citizens. Whether or not you agree with the current administration's policies hopefully we can agree that it is entirely reasonable for them to deport foreign political dissidents more or less at their discretion.
If you want to put this to the test try crossing the Canadian border and when they ask you the purpose of your visit respond that it's to attend a protest.
this is funny if you are being sarcastic
Oh, I fully support their right to protest.
It just looks a bit ridiculous when students walk out in protest against things that are far outside the influence of their school, city, or even state.
Damn that social conscience, huh?
If memory serves the father of the Chinese bomb studied in America and went back. It may be inconceivable to Americans but Chinese patriotism exists.
Besides you can live a comfortable life in PRC nowadays or live in a racist America.
Yeah that was my first thought is it’s a tit for tat poach. They got the Gemini researcher so google responded in kind.
Well, the problem aren't just the NSF funding cuts. Everyone else is already dumping truckloads of cash. There's also the public health situation (who wants measles or polio?), the risk of retaliatory attacks from the countries we're at war with, etc. You could write paragraphs about why the US is less attractive to researchers.
When I was a deep learning PhD in the first Trump administration, US universities were already very deeply affected by the Muslim ban, and so a lot of talent ended up in other countries.
Sibling commentators are rightfully pointing out that foreigners, especially those who would not be recognized as white, face an onerous and risky customs process with long-term and increasing risks of deportation. When you see a headline like the NIST labs abruptly restricting foreign scientists, _everything_ else feels uncertain. Even if someone doesn't believe they're personally at risk for deportation, they're still seeing everything else.
And then it all boils down to a reputational thing. The era where we were the top choice for research is in the past. If you start a PhD in the US on your resume during this era, you might be anticipating how you'll answe the question of why you weren't good enough to get accepted somewhere better.
They probably have tried, but you have to have more cash than those researchers feel they can get starting their own lab. When you consider the fact that their new startup lab would have the entire nation of China as, in effect, a captive market; you start to see how almost any amount of money would be too little to convince them not to make a run at that new startup. If money is their aim.
I think Alibaba needs to just give these guys a blank check. Let them fill it in themselves. Absent that, I'm pretty sure they'll make their own startup.
I do think it'd be a big loss for the rest of the world though if they close whatever model their startup comes up with.
> I do think it'd be a big loss for the rest of the world though if they close whatever model their startup comes up with.
That's very likely to happen once the gap with OpenAI/Anthropic has been closed and they managed to pop the bubble.
I don’t know, the EV bubble deflated and Chinese firms are still pumping them out with subsidies like their life depends on it.
Been running the 32B locally for a few days and honestly surprised how well it handles agentic coding stuff. Definitely punches above its weight. Only complaint is it sometimes decides to ignore half your prompt when instructions get long, but at this size I guess thats the tradeoff.
One thing I’ve noticed with local models is that people tolerate a lot more trial and error behavior. When a hosted model wastes tokens it feels expensive, but when a local model loops a bit it just feels like it’s “thinking.”
If models like Qwen can get good enough for coding tasks locally, the real shift might be economic rather than purely capability.
Wasted tokens are preferred for local models, I need the GPU mainframe in my bedroom to heat it as I live in a third world country with unreliable heating (Switzerland).
I'm hopeful they will pick up their work elsewhere and continue on this great fight for competitive open weight models.
To be honest, it's sort of what I expected governments to be funding right now, but I suppose Chinese companies are a close second.
Getting a bit of whiplash goin from AI is replacing people, to AI is dead without (these specific) people. Surely we're far enough ahead that AI can take it from here?
Wild times!
Anthropic has one nine of uptime right now. One.
https://status.claude.com/
If AI could effectively replace people, you wouldn’t need CEOs to keep trying to convince people.
Anthropic also fires off the alarm bells seemingly at any sign of issue. I've personally only noticed an outage once, and the status page wasn't even showing it as down at that time. It eventually did update about 45 minutes later, then I was back up and running another 15 minutes later but the "outage" on the status page stayed up for another hour or so.
Probably good to sent alerts early, but they might be going a bit too early.
That's 99% is two nines?
It was 98.xx this morning when I posted.
Everything on that page has two nines, so not sure what you're trying to say here.
This morning it was less than 99% which is one nine of reliability.
In any case, two nines of reliability is not impressive.
Right now everything on that page is 98 point something, so it must be fluctuating.
Not sure what the uptime is meant to signal. People have quite low uptime as well…
uptime signals reliability
Huh? Servers aren't people and thus have completely different expectations, or what am I missing here
9% uptime?
One 9 would be 90% (aka 0.9)
Who is suggesting "AI is dead without (these specific) people"? People are wondering what it means specifically for the Qwen model family.
We've gone from AGI goals to short-term thinking via Ads. That puts things better in perspective, I think.
Claude is incapable of producing a native application for itself, and is bad enough with web ones to justify Anthropic acquiring Bun.
I would second that Qwen3.5 is exceptionally good. In a calibration, it (35b variant) was running locally with Ada NextGen 24GB to do the same things with easy-llm-cli in comparison with gemini-cli + Gemini 3 Pro, they were at par … really impressive it ran pretty fast …
q4 quant gives you 175 tg and 7K pp, beats most cloud providers
I tried the new qwen model in Codex CLI and in Roo Code and I found it to be pretty bad. For instance I told it I wanted a new vite app and it just started writing all the files from scratch (which didn’t work) rather than using the vite CLI tool.
Is there a better agentic coding harness people are using for these models? Based on my experience I can definitely believe the claims that these models are overfit to Evals and not broadly capable.
I've noticed that open weight models tend to hesitate to use tools or commands unless they appeared often in the training or you tell them very explicitly to do so in your AGENTS.md or prompt.
They also struggle at translating very broad requirements to a set of steps that I find acceptable. Planning helps a lot.
Regarding the harness, I have no idea how much they differ but I seem to have more luck with https://pi.dev than OpenCode. I think the minimalism of Pi meshes better with the limited capabilities of open models.
+1 to this, anecdotally I’ve found in my own evaluations that if your system prompt doesn’t explicitly declare how to invoke a tool and e.g. describe what each tool does, most models I’ve tried fail to call tools or will try to call them but not necessarily use the right format. With the right prompt meanwhile, even weak models shoot up in eval accuracy.
Have frontier lab do the plan which is the most time consuming part anyways and then local llm do the implementation. Frontier model can orchestrate your tickets, write a plan for them and dispatch local llm agents to implement at about 180 tokens/s, vllm can probably ,manage something like 25 concurrent sessions on RTX 6000 Do it all in a worktrees and then have frontier model do the review and merge. I am just a retired hobbyist but that's my approach, I run everything through gitea issues, each issue gets launched by orchestrator in a new tmux window and two main agents (implementer and reviewer get their own panes so I can see what's going on). I think claude code now has this aspect also somewhat streamlined but I have seen no need to change up my approach yet since I am just a retired hobbyist tinkering on my personal projects. Also right now I just use claude code subagents but have been thinking of trying to replace them with some of these Qwen 3.5 models because they do seem cpable and I have the hardware to run them.
What is "the new qwen model"? There are a dozen and you can get them in a dozen different quantizations (or more) which are of different quality each.
In my experience Qwen3.5/Qwen3-Coder-Next perform best in their own harness, Qwen-Code. You can also crib the system prompt and tool definitions from there though. Though caveat, despite the Qwen models being the state of the art for local models they are like a year behind anything you can pay for commercially so asking for it to build a new app from scratch might be a bit much.
I wonder if an american company poached one/all of them. They've been pretty much bleeding edge of open models and would not surprise me if Amazon or Google snatched them up
It would surprise me if they're willing to come to the US in the setting of the current DHS and ICE situation.
Does anyone know when the small Qwen 3.5 models are going to be on OpenRouter?
they're already there ?? https://openrouter.ai/qwen/qwen3.5-27b
There are smaller ones on HuggingFace https://huggingface.co/models?other=qwen3_5&sort=least_param... with 0.8B, 2B, 4B and 9B parameters.
Like 4B, 2B, 9B. Supposedly they are surprisingly smart.
Yep. The 9B has excellent image recognition. I showed it a PCB photo and it correctly identified all components and the board type from part numbers and shape. OCR quality was solid. Tool calling with opencode worked without issues, but general coding ability is still far from sonnet-tier. Asked it to add a feature to an existing react app, it couldn't produce an error-free build and fell into a delete-redo loop. Even when I fixed the errors, the UI looked really bad. A more explicit prompt probably would have helped. Opus one-shotted it, same prompt, the component looked exactly as expected.
But I'll be running this locally for note summarization, code review, and OCR. Very coherent for its size.
More discussion:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47246746
I am singularly impressed by 35B/A3, hope that is not the reason he had to leave.
> me stepping down. bye my beloved qwen.
the qwen is dead, long live the qwen.
It sounds like the lead was demoted to attract new talent, quit as a result, and the rest of the team also resigned to force management to change their minds.
If so, I'm happy that the team held together, and I hope that endogenous tech leads get to control their own career and tech destiny after hard work leads to great products. (It's almost as inspiring as tank man, and the tank commanders who tried to avoid harming him...)
(ducking the downvote for challenging the primacy of equity...)
My conspiracy theory hat is that somehow investors with a stake in openai as well is sabotaging, like they did when kicking emad out of stabilityai
More likely some high ranking party member's nepobaby from Gemini sniffed success with Qwen and the original folks just walked away as their reward disappeared.
source?
There is no source. But the party in China does have ultimate control.
There would never be an Anthropic/Pentagon situation in China, because in China there isn't actually separation between the military and any given AI company. The party is fully in control.
apples v.s. oranges. The later is true, Emad did get sabotaged (for not being able to raise money in time, about 8-month before he's leaving). Junyang didn't have that long arc of incidents.
Were they kneecapped by Anthropic blocking their distillation attempts?
What Anthropic was complaining about is training on mass-elicited chat logs. It is very much a ToS violation (you aren't allowed to exploit the service for the purpose of building a competitor) so the complaint is well-founded but (1) it's not "distillation" properly understood; it can only feasibly extract the same kind of narrow knowledge you'd read out from chat logs, perhaps including primitive "let's think step by step" output (which are not true fine-tuned reasoning tokens); because you have no access to the actual weights; and (2) it's something Western AI firms are very much believed to do to one another and to Chinese models all the time anyway. Hence the brouhaha about Western models claiming to be DeepSeek when they answer in Chinese.
The "distillation attacks" are mostly using Claude as LLM-as-a-judge. They are not training on the reasoning chains in a SFT fashion.
So they're paying expensive input tokens to extract at best a tiny amount of information ("judgment") per request? That's even less like "distillation" than the other claim of them trying to figure out reasoning by asking the model to think step by step.
what the hell, their models were promising tho
inb4 qwen is less of a supply chain risk than anthropic