I'm a huge open model fan, and have used them since forever, even have daily drivers for on-prem dev, but no. They do not beat opus on real-world usage.
Qwen models are impressively good for what they are, are "good enough" for plenty tasks, can be ran locally on decently priced hardware, and so on. They certainly have their uses, and the field in general has advanced faster than my early expectations. But to compare a 27B model to SotA behemoths from a few months ago is doing everyone a disservice, especially people who pick it up, try to use them just like API models, and leave disappointed and confused. Number goes up on a benchmark isn't it.
We have an internal eval that measures performance on tasks for a handful of embedded systems repos for our mmWave radios (mostly Rust, some C for microcontroller stuff). Qwen3.6-27B scores only 4% lower for pass@1, n=250 compared to Opus-4.8.
For the labeled dataset, the average PR size they're being measured against is around 1.5k SLOC.
This is very much "real-world usage" for us. The sort of change sets that come in daily/weekly and are solving non-trivial issues in the respective codebases.
As is usually the case, the most broad claims from both the labs and from the consequent pushback are talking past each other.
Okay but the parent said real-world usage, presumably meaning coding tasks.
We have a whole bunch of complex evals that Haiku 4.5 passes. That doesn't mean it is a good model for coding.
0% is 4 percentage points (pp) less than 4%.
I agree, but then we just need meaningful benchmarks that clearly show that! Otherwise it's hand waving about something that should be put on paper in quantifiable terms.
There are tools like promptfoo designed for this.
That's the rub. AI benchmarks are IMO, by and large totally unreliable. We think of them as similar to traditional benchmarks of deterministic processes where the number of variables is low. But they're anything but that. Non-deterministic processes with an astounding number of variables and fuzzy acceptance criteria.
It leads to results like these, where if you take it at face value, the only conclusion you can draw is "wow Anthropic must be stupid if Opus takes 1T parameters to do what Qwen can do in 27B."
For example you would tell a model hey, become an expert in this language for me, search it online, it would still need to learn it and download the data to it's context and then increasing the memory usage, there's no way around it.
deepseek-v4-flash needs web search to return true facts.
I am currently using Qwen 3.6 on RTX 3090 and I have to admit that without MTP it would be too slow to be acceptable for me (30-35 tok/sec without MTP, 60-70 with MTP). Without MTP I would just use OpenRouter and rather pay for speed despite having a capable local setup.
So advantage is not having to produce your own quantisation / gguf from .safetensors you've linked.
Run the one you linked if you are running vllm (safetensors)
e.g. If you try to chat to it about something philosophical for example, or maybe a debate / creative writing, then you'll very quickly see how it is still a much smaller model at the end of the day.
Still, it's such a relatively accessible model to run, and I find a big part of leveraging smaller models is to give it well-scoped tasks; not too high level or ambitious ones. Very impressive for its size and the ability to run locally :)
It's a bit bare at the moment, I assume they are going to add further detail later (eg comparison to other quants), similar to their other releases.
Sometimes they're just slow and expensive, so we we KLD as a proxy measure and it's very high correlation (95%+)
Gemma 4 31B: "Um, if I really said all of that, I guess I'd say this next"
Gemma 4 26B: "Dude, I would've said completely different stuff" (large divergence)
Gemma 4 12B: "Umm, there's zero chance I would've said some of this" (INFINITE divergence)
Gemma 4 E4B and E2B: "Derp derp, I'm happy to say almost anything" (lowest divergence)
For models which are chat trained, they simply would not recite Wikipedia, so the divergence is almost meaningless. I thought about capturing a realistic coding session and trying to use that as the corpus, but you need to preserve the turn-based tokens and such, so I moved on to other things.
Just wanted to say that this is a very important point that I totally agree with. People are obsessed with KL divergence, but it is yet to be demonstrated to be a descent proxy for agentic coding benchmarks.