21 comments

  • jbellis an hour ago

    For coding, qwen 3.6 35b a3b solved 11/98 of the Power Ranking tasks (best-of-two), compared to 10/98 for the same size qwen 3.5. So it's at best very slightly improved and not at all in the class of qwen 3.5 27b dense (26 solved) let alone opus (95/98 solved, for 4.6).

    • __natty__ 11 minutes ago

      You compare tiny modal for local inference vs propertiary, expensive frontier model. It would be more fair to compare against similar priced model or tiny frontier models like haiku, flash or gpt nano.

      • ericd 9 minutes ago

        Eh it’s important perspective, lest someone start thinking they can drop $5k on a laptop and be free of Anthropic/OpenAI. Expensive lesson.

  • mentalgear an hour ago

    I understand the 'fun factor' but at this point I really wonder what this pelican still proofs ? I mean, providers certainly could have adapted for it if they wanted, and if you want to test how well a model adapts to potential out of distribution contexts, it might be more worthwhile to mix different animals with different activity types (a whale on a skateboard) than always the same.

    • simonw an hour ago

      That's why I did the flamingo on a unicycle.

      For a delightful moment this morning I thought I might have finally caught a model provider cheating by training for the pelican, but the flamingo convinced me that wasn't the case.

      • furyofantares 13 minutes ago

        It is completely wild to me that you prefer Qwen's flamingo. I think it's really bad and Opus' is pretty good.

        • simonw 11 minutes ago

          The Opus one doesn't even have a bowtie.

      • akavel 9 minutes ago

        r/LocalLlama is now doing a horse in a racing car:

        https://redd.it/1slz38i

      • prodigycorp 33 minutes ago

        To me the opus flamingo is waaaay better than the qwen one. qwen has the better pelican, though.

      • dude250711 30 minutes ago

        Is a flamingo on a unicycle not merely a special case of a pelican on a bicycle?

  • ericpauley 2 hours ago

    Going to have to disagree on the backup test. Opus flamingo is actually on the pedals and seat with functional spokes and beak. In terms of adherence to physical reality Qwen is completely off. To me it's a little puzzling that someone would prefer the Qwen output.

    I'd say the example actually does (vaguely) suggest that Qwen might be overfitting to the Pelican.

    • wongarsu 28 minutes ago

      Qwen's flamingo is artistically far more interesting. It's a one-eyed flamingo with sunglasses and a bow tie who smokes pot. Meanwhile Opus just made a boring, somewhat dorky flamingo. Even the ground and sky are more interesting in Qwen's version

      But in terms of making something physically plausible, Opus certainly got a lot closer

      • kmacdough 13 minutes ago

        Given adherence is a more significant practical barrier, it's probably the better signal. That is, if we decide too look for signal here.

  • VHRanger 28 minutes ago

    That's not surprising; Opus & Sonnet have been regressing on many non-coding tasks since about the 4.1 release in our testing

  • aliljet 28 minutes ago

    I'm really curious about what competes with Claude Code to drive a local LLM like Qwen 3.6?

  • comandillos an hour ago

    I've been using Qwen3.5-35B-A3B for a bit via open code and oMLX on M5 Max with 128Gb of RAM and I have to say it's impressively good for a model of that size. I've seen a huge jump in the quality of the tool calls and how well it handles the agentic workflow.

    • iib an hour ago

      This is about the newly release Qwen3.6. Just wanted to make sure you got that correctly.

  • lofaszvanitt 11 minutes ago

    That Qwen flamingo on the unicycle is actually quite good. A work of art.

  • 19qUq 40 minutes ago

    How about switching to MechaStalin on a tricycle? It gets kind of boring.

    • mvanbaak 17 minutes ago

      boring ... the ways all the models fail at a simple task never gets boring to me