alt Hacker NewsSomething is afoot in the land of Qwen
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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?
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
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.
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.
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!
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 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
Does anyone know when the small Qwen 3.5 models are going to be on OpenRouter?
More discussion:
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
Were they kneecapped by Anthropic blocking their distillation attempts?
what the hell, their models were promising tho
[dead]
inb4 qwen is less of a supply chain risk than anthropic
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.