alt Hacker NewsAnd once again, Qwen 3.8 27B beats Opus 4.6, what the hell.
It's both funny and a bit terrifying and I still can't quite believe it. It runs decently on a gaming PC! Opus 4.6 came out only 6 months ago and was then broadly considered the new SOTA by a comfortable margin! How in hell did they package capability in the ballpark of a Feb 2026 frontier SOTA into 27B?!
More importantly, what's the point of building monster-scale data centers on unprecedented amounts of debt when a more than good enough model runs on a GPU from a couple years ago?
The coming months are going to be exciting, that's for sure...
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I built a benchmark myself to track this and confirmed the same thing
https://gist.github.com/nharziro/aed0c364ce2f295a493494c6f1b...
Very similar performance to 4.6 and codex 5.3 but slow and token inefficient. Still wildly impressive. Initially I didn't believe the results because 3.6 27b couldn't complete the benchmark so this is a massive leap in capability.
> More importantly, what's the point of building monster-scale data centers on unprecedented amounts of debt when a more than good enough model runs on a GPU from a couple years ago?
Probably because the future "monster" models will be insane. 100T+ param models might be the type of things that can independently run a small business, which means anyone not using them is at a distinct disadvantage to their competitors.
The top model from 2025 looks silly compared to the top model of the first half of 2026. Do you feel like progress has stalled?
I'm reminded of that paradox from sci-fi that says that starting an interstellar journey as soon as the technology is capable of it is uneconomical, because the trip will take so long that newer technology will arrive at the destination first, despite departing at a later date.