But I have to say, I quite like the way Muse Glimmer thinks and talks. It's a cocky bastard in tone, but it's quite good, and its thinking traces are relatively terse.
AI companies release models when they are ready - not on a set schedule. The steps are required to produce a release candidate, so a company can choose to bless the RC with the best metrics at any time - or alternatively continue (post/)training newer RCs if they feel they can do better, and they have time. When a model is ready for release is subjective, and can take into consideration what the competition is doing.
An obvious counter-example to schedules driving releases is the still unreleased Gemini 3.6 Pro.
Just recently, Minimax H3 released as open weights on the eve of Seedance 2.5 global availability. It's not as good, but it's good enough and it's completely open.
Flux 3, which is nowhere near as good as either, suddenly announced their release once news of these other two became public. They knew if they waited they'd be ignored. It didn't really help them much, unfortunately.
The LLM releases are even more rivalrous.
And don't forget all of the competing launches planned before Google IO or major release events.
Companies like to eat into the news and press cycle of their rivals.
Minimax H3 can run exceptionally fast (10 minutes for a 15 second 0.5mp video and that's stock cuda 13), works on 16 GB VRAM GPUs, etc. If Flux3 is anything like Flux2, it’s going to require an absolute monster truck of a machine and still run significantly slower. Even if it’s a better model, that won’t matter as much if nobody releases any LoRAs or fine-tunes for it.
Not to mention BFL licensing often feels deceptively confusing and restrictive.
Seems a bit premature of a statement lol
Even if I did, we’re talking barely a decade
The whole class of what can reasonably fit in a single GPU is an interesting category of LLM, and based on the results I've seen from 3.6 35B A3B and 27B versus what existed a year prior, it seems there's a lot of room for advancement.
As people have called out, Glimmer appears to be a trade-off rather than a clear winner.
And from what I've been reading, no one is expecting Qwen 3.8's model in this space to be a clear winner, but just slightly and marginally better.
That's a little concerning as DeepSeek v4 Flash proved at it larger sizes there's a ton of room left to compress knowledge.
If we don't see something that's substantially better in the ~30B param space soon - it would appear we might've saturated that size with knowledge.
I wouldn't be quite so pessimistic. We may have saturated the current approach, but I think there's a lot still left in terms of compression, attention, active parameters, caching etc. etc.
For contrast, the Newcomen steam engine (widely considered the first commercially useful engine) was used for over 60 years before the next major improvements. Now, 300 years later, we’re still finding ways to significantly improve heat engines.
Off-topic, but I stumbled upon the first Newcomen engine imported into Australia in a museum in Sydney and I was unexpectedly charmed (not an Engine Guy). It's large, but nothing like the awe of "mega-engineering", it's crude, but it clearly has such amazing utility (when compared to a reality without it) and it changed the world
Qwen 3.6 27B was already a massive gift to smaller homelabs around the world; anything more is just a delightful surprise.
I suspect this is the only use-case I would consider...and I don't really have a use-case for "creative writing" that I would delegate to an LLM. I suppose for dialogue generation in games?
But yes, hard agree. Why on Earth would you ever want to write code with a model that is supposedly "jailbroken"? So it can put great backdoors into everything it touches? Pass.
I use it to write short sci-fi stories. Life is not only about being an SDE.
> Why on Earth would you ever want to write code with a model that is supposedly "jailbroken"?
I need a model which decent enough at coding to write boilerplate for me, yet I do not need to unload in case I want to write an article or enguage in my writing hobby.Exactly why Gemma 4 are so popular.
> So it can put great backdoors into everything it touches?
What a strange take...
It seems to know tooling and coding.