alt Hacker News> The distillations of Qwen 3.8 down to a 27B model are good, but they're not on a par with frontier models.
Does it have to be? There are plenty of coding tasks, where it's good enough.
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Pavilion2095 • today at 9:47 AM
> coding tasks
Exactly. There are common coding tasks that these models can adequately do. They are absolute trash for anything that isn't coding. And even with coding, they are so, so far behind frontier models.
Practically, no, the distill is great. It's fine to use it.
However, if you're having a discussion about access to frontier models, and using Qwen 3.8 as an example of how open weights is a solution, then you should be honest and accurate about what you're talking about. Making an argument like "People can run Qwen 3.8 at home. That shows open weights are great." is a bit disingenuous if you're not also making it clear that you're not talking about Qwen 3.8 Max (or that you have a beast of a PC at home :D ).