[HN Gopher] Something is afoot in the land of Qwen
___________________________________________________________________
Something is afoot in the land of Qwen
Author : simonw
Score : 440 points
Date : 2026-03-04 15:55 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (simonwillison.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (simonwillison.net)
| raffael_de wrote:
| > me stepping down. bye my beloved qwen.
|
| the qwen is dead, long live the qwen.
| airstrike wrote:
| 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.
| zoba wrote:
| 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.
| sosodev wrote:
| 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.
| malwrar wrote:
| +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.
| vardalab wrote:
| 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.
| lreeves wrote:
| 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.
| Tepix wrote:
| 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.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| More discussion:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47246746
| sosodev wrote:
| 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.
| paoliniluis wrote:
| what's your take between Qwen3.5-35B-A3B and Qwen3-Coder-Next?
| sosodev wrote:
| 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.
| kamranjon wrote:
| 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
| xrd wrote:
| What do you use as the orchestrator? By this I mean
| opencode, or the like. Is that the right term?
| simonw wrote:
| 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.
| kamranjon wrote:
| 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.
| nvader wrote:
| 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.
| karmakaze wrote:
| 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/visu
| ali...
| Twirrim wrote:
| 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.
| sosodev wrote:
| 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.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > 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.
| misnome wrote:
| > 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.
| cbm-vic-20 wrote:
| 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)?
| a3b_unknown wrote:
| What is the meaning of 'A3B'?
| simonw wrote:
| 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.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| 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.
| EnPissant wrote:
| The ability to stream weights from disk has nothing to do
| with MoE or not. You can always do this. It will be
| unusable either way.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Agreed but for a dense model you'd have to stream the
| _whole_ model for every token, whereas with MoE there 's
| at least the possibility that some experts may be "cold"
| for any given request and not be streamed in or cached.
| This will probably become more likely as models get even
| sparser. (The "it's unusable" judgmemt is correct if
| you're considering close-to-minimum reauirements, but for
| just getting a model to fit, caching "almost all of it"
| in RAM may be an excellent choice.)
| abhikul0 wrote:
| 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...
| arcanemachiner wrote:
| Have you tried the '--jinja' flag in llama-server?
| abhikul0 wrote:
| 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.
| nu11ptr wrote:
| 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?
| bigyabai wrote:
| 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.
| politelemon wrote:
| 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.
| sosodev wrote:
| 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.
| misnome wrote:
| 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.
| reactordev wrote:
| Turn down the temperature and you'll see less "simpler" short
| cuts.
| smokel wrote:
| 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.
| LoganDark wrote:
| 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.
| reactordev wrote:
| 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.
| sheepscreek wrote:
| 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.
| wood_spirit wrote:
| 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.
| e1g wrote:
| Claude Code recently downgraded the default thinking
| level to "medium", so it's worth checking your settings.
| shaan7 wrote:
| > that it would be "simpler" to just... not do what I asked
|
| That sounds too close to what I feel on some days xD
| storus wrote:
| > 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.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > 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.
| slices wrote:
| I've seen behavior like that when the model wasn't being
| served with sufficiently sized context window
| anana_ wrote:
| I've had even better results using the dense 27B model -- less
| looping and churning on problems
| whalesalad wrote:
| What hardware are you running this on?
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| 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!
| vidarh wrote:
| Who is suggesting "AI is dead without (these specific) people"?
| People are wondering what it means _specifically for the Qwen
| model family_.
| mhitza wrote:
| We've gone from AGI goals to short-term thinking via Ads. That
| puts things better in perspective, I think.
| dude250711 wrote:
| Claude is incapable of producing a native application for
| itself, and is bad enough with web ones to justify Anthropic
| acquiring Bun.
| janalsncm wrote:
| 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.
| mungoman2 wrote:
| Not sure what the uptime is meant to signal. People have
| quite low uptime as well...
| jug wrote:
| Huh? Servers aren't people and thus have completely
| different expectations, or what am I missing here
| greenchair wrote:
| uptime signals reliability
| OsrsNeedsf2P wrote:
| That's 99% is two nines?
| janalsncm wrote:
| It was 98.xx this morning when I posted.
| px43 wrote:
| 9% uptime?
| AgentME wrote:
| One 9 would be 90% (aka 0.9)
| kylemaxwell wrote:
| Everything on that page has two nines, so not sure what
| you're trying to say here.
| relaxing wrote:
| Right now everything on that page is 98 point something, so
| it must be fluctuating.
| janalsncm wrote:
| This morning it was less than 99% which is one nine of
| reliability.
|
| In any case, two nines of reliability is not impressive.
| Jeremy1026 wrote:
| 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.
| softwaredoug wrote:
| 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
| mft_ wrote:
| Indeed; or, Europe badly needs a competitive model to hedge
| against US political nonsense.
| tiahura wrote:
| Competitive models are illegal in the EU.
| ivan_gammel wrote:
| Offering ,,You are welcome" relocation package to Anthropic
| might be a good idea.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| Given how American govt. has treated Anthropic, I think you
| might be right. EU truly has a remarkable opportunity to
| make Anthropic/Claude European.
| petcat wrote:
| 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.
| ivan_gammel wrote:
| Having one ,,champion" is flawed European approach. We
| need local competition and headhunting to make it fly.
| azinman2 wrote:
| Hard to compete in an environment that's anti-996 and the
| pay is so much less.
| ivan_gammel wrote:
| Yes. 996 is for lazy people.
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| 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?
| lejalv wrote:
| 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).
| impossiblefork wrote:
| 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.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| 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.
| mijoharas wrote:
| It'd be great if they went to Mistral!
| bilbo0s wrote:
| 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.
| simgt wrote:
| > 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.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| I don't know, the EV bubble deflated and Chinese firms are
| still pumping them out with subsidies like their life
| depends on it.
| velcrovan wrote:
| 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.
| ecshafer wrote:
| 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.
| danny_codes wrote:
| 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
| softwaredoug wrote:
| 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.
| bdangubic wrote:
| what is the issue with having a ceiling?
| WarmWash wrote:
| 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.
| kelipso wrote:
| 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.
| bdangubic wrote:
| wowsa - wasn't expecting star athletes and sports to
| enter this conversation... wild!
| danny_codes wrote:
| 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.
| jamespo wrote:
| Damn that social conscience, huh?
| petcat wrote:
| > 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.
| ecshafer wrote:
| 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.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| 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.
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| 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.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| 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.
| neves wrote:
| At least it has been decades since China Gov bombed
| innocent people in other countries. A peaceful and
| responsible government.
| petcat wrote:
| > 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.
| cyberax wrote:
| This "social credit" thing is dead in China.
| petcat wrote:
| 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...
| cyberax wrote:
| 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.
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| "At this point" being the key phrase.
| kelipso wrote:
| A key phrase that can be used to speculate about whatever
| bs one can think of.
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| 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 /
| flock cameras / etc as it hasn't been used against you
| _at this point_.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| > 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. "I can insult my pedophile president" (who
| doesn't care if you do) isn't exactly a flex.
|
| It does tell us something though that the evaluation of
| American life now consists of parasocial interactions
| with the president on social media. I'm starting to
| belief Bruno Macaes, ex Portuguese secretary of state,
| was prescient with his diagnosis that American material
| society has rotted to the point where life is now
| entirely defined by virtual interactions. That's the
| difference between China and the US today.
|
| The president's a pedophile, a criminal, undeterred by
| democracy, economy or social disorder but you can freely
| yell into the void. Have you considered that in the US
| one can freely say all these things precisely because
| that's irrelevant?
| petcat wrote:
| > The president's a pedophile, a criminal, undeterred by
| democracy, economy or social disorder but you can freely
| yell into the void. Have you considered that in the US
| one can freely say all these things precisely because
| that's irrelevant?
|
| Americans will vote for their Congress representatives in
| November. They will have a chance to decide how they want
| their government to be run. The US President was already
| shot-down once by the Supreme Court (tariffs). The system
| is working. Let the voters decide, and then let it work.
| WarmWash wrote:
| What's ironic is that China is desperately trying to be
| that country, but the US has then in a
| geographic/geopolitical choke hold.
| 1024core wrote:
| 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...
| VWWHFSfQ wrote:
| > 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.
| bdangubic wrote:
| 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...
| cyberax wrote:
| 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.
| cheema33 wrote:
| 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.
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| 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.
| bdangubic wrote:
| this is funny if you are being sarcastic
| cyberax wrote:
| 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.
| cyberax wrote:
| 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.
| petcat wrote:
| > 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?
| maxglute wrote:
| 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.
| leptons wrote:
| 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.
| px43 wrote:
| Wild to call 1.42 billion people racist despite having met
| very few of them.
| leptons wrote:
| It's funny that you think you know who I've met. _YOU DON
| 'T KNOW ME_.
| WarmWash wrote:
| Racism in even the worse parts of America doesn't even
| begin to touch the racism present in
| monocultural/monoracial countries.
| Larrikin wrote:
| 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.
| Sabinus wrote:
| "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.
| nozzlegear wrote:
| This is a weird argument. Japanese racism is fine because
| the Japanese are polite and apply it evenly?
| Larrikin wrote:
| Despite what some on this site will argue, racism is
| always bad.
| losvedir wrote:
| 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.
| maxglute wrote:
| > 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.
| gaoshan wrote:
| 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.
| sourcegrift wrote:
| 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.
| jwolfe wrote:
| This thread is about bringing these people to the US.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| 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.
| genxy wrote:
| 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/hundre
| d...
|
| https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/attorney-says-
| detained-k...
|
| The regime is powered by racism and doesn't think through
| things.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| _" Papers, please."_ comes to the US of A.
| mmaunder wrote:
| Yeah that was my first thought is it's a tit for tat poach.
| They got the Gemini researcher so google responded in kind.
| lynndotpy wrote:
| 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.
| expedition32 wrote:
| 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.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| 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.
| vonneumannstan wrote:
| Were they kneecapped by Anthropic blocking their distillation
| attempts?
| zozbot234 wrote:
| 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.
| red2awn wrote:
| The "distillation attacks" are mostly using Claude as LLM-as-
| a-judge. They are not training on the reasoning chains in a
| SFT fashion.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| 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.
| red2awn wrote:
| LLM-as-a-judge is quite effective method to RL a model,
| similar to RLHF but more objective and scalable. But yes,
| anthropic is making it more serious than it is. Plus
| DeepSeek only did it for 125k requests, significantly
| less than the other labs, but Anthropic still listed them
| first to create FUD.
| multisport wrote:
| inb4 qwen is less of a supply chain risk than anthropic
| hwers wrote:
| 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
| storus wrote:
| 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.
| ahmadyan wrote:
| source?
| WarmWash wrote:
| 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.
| liuliu wrote:
| 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.
| ilaksh wrote:
| Does anyone know when the small Qwen 3.5 models are going to be
| on OpenRouter?
| armanj wrote:
| they're already there ?? https://openrouter.ai/qwen/qwen3.5-27b
| ilaksh wrote:
| Like 4B, 2B, 9B. Supposedly they are surprisingly smart.
| Sakthimm wrote:
| 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.
| yorwba wrote:
| There are smaller ones on HuggingFace https://huggingface.co/
| models?other=qwen3_5&sort=least_param... with 0.8B, 2B, 4B
| and 9B parameters.
| quantum_state wrote:
| 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 ...
| vardalab wrote:
| q4 quant gives you 175 tg and 7K pp, beats most cloud providers
| hintymad wrote:
| 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?
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Perhaps they wanted future Qwen models to be closed and
| proprietary, and the authors couldn't abide by that.
| kartika848484 wrote:
| what the hell, their models were promising tho
| nurettin wrote:
| I am singularly impressed by 35B/A3, hope that is not the reason
| he had to leave.
| lacoolj wrote:
| 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
| ferfumarma wrote:
| It would surprise me if they're willing to come to the US in
| the setting of the current DHS and ICE situation.
| lzaborowski wrote:
| 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.
| trvz wrote:
| 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).
| w10-1 wrote:
| 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...)
| vicchenai wrote:
| 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.
| xyzsparetimexyz wrote:
| Forget it Jake, its China(town)
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