Comment by rohansood15

16 hours ago

Didn't expect it to beat 3.8 27B so cleanly.

Opus 4.6 Max self-hosted at 30 tok/s on a 5k Macbook in Aug 2026. The LLM timelines are crazy.

For comparison with hosted models, GPT 5.6 Luna scores 67% on DeepSWE, compared to 59% here for Qwen.

Luna is $0.20 / $1.20 vs $0.16 / $0.47 with Qwen.

  • This is a good counter argument. But you have to note that this is after OpenAI cut Luna costs by 80%. If you compare launch pricing, Qwen probably comes out ahead on a cost-performance basis.

  • Those prices are just tokens? Since each model uses different amounts of tokens to do the same thing, it's a misleading price that often makes open-weights look more competitive than they are, since most open weights models use dramatically more tokens and time to complete tasks than many frontier models.

    In Artifical Analysis's cost per task, Luna(max) costs $0.05 per task, and Qwen 3.8 27B costs $0.25 per task, a 5X increase. We'll see how 3.8-flash-next does.

    • the important thing is that Qwen 3.7 27B will run unlimited jobs on my consumer grade laptop at 60 tokens/second for free, forever, in about 1-2 years

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Curious, how are you running it and what quantization are you using? I've mostly been using MTPLX; 125B sort of looks like it'd be right at the limits of my 128GB MacBook once you factor in KV cache and context window.. wondering if it's worth it compared to the 27B model which gives me a lot of headroom or even a 72B model.

I don't like these comparisons. Sure it is impressive, but it does not have a world knowledge of larger models. It has most of theirs intelligence.

  • For world knowledge, you'd want it to find and reference the source material to be sure. At that point, it doesn't matter if the knowledge is embedded.

    • Keep in mind a web search might not include scanned books baked in the weights ;)

    • I think the big models have adequate recall, so tool use is probably unnecessary, but the user said the correctness of my response is important. Let me look up the data instead of relying on my memory.

    • World knowledge also means knowing the various algorithms and ways particular programming problems are solved.

      You can't search what you don't even know exists.

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  • If/when we can get larger context this will mostly be mitigated by these smaller models being able to search the internet.

    Self-learning/improving would be even better but that's still a long way to go.

  • In a lot of spaces, this is actually preferable.

    Ex - nodejs natively supports a huge set of typescript with built-in type stripping these days. But ask most hosted models to build a typescript project and they default to a heavy compile step, or a tool like tsx, ts-node, etc.

    Models with lots of "world knowledge" have a good chunk of that knowledge go stale, and there's no real way to refresh it without training a new model.

    Another classic example of this back in the day was to ask who the president of the US was, and watch different models happily give different answers based on the date they were trained.

    ---

    Personally, I'm really interested to see if we're headed towards a spot where the model is entirely distinct from the knowledge store.

    We're vaguely there with the ability for models to go search the web, but I think the reliability of that path is going to continue declining (more and more spam content, less and less genuine value).

    I kinda want a paradigm where I can pick and engine and a knowledge bank, and combine them as I please.

    Ex - if I'm doing gardening, I can pick "gardening for models (version 32)" as my knowledge store.

    If I'm doing auto-repair... "cars for dummies (version 3)". etc...

    • > Personally, I'm really interested to see if we're headed towards a spot where the model is entirely distinct from the knowledge store.

      This is what I've been trying to focus on with local AI for now. I've been trying to build all new documentation so it's more AI friendly. It's been pretty interesting. Qwen-35BA3B with a small prompt does a good job of surfacing what I'd consider institutional knowledge.

      I've been trying to silo the docs I write from the model with a prompt that tells it not to use general knowledge unless asked to. From the anecdotal testing I did, Qwen-35BA3B is great for it. It does a really good job of following the prompt and calling tools, so I've been able to play around a lot to see what seems to work best.

      Ultimately, I think one of the most effective uses of AI will be having a distinct knowledge store combined with an opinionated agent (and sub-agent) setup along with different models for each task.

      Who owns the knowledge store is going to be the big caveat. Right now I think the big online models are trying for generic, persistent memory and I'd be very hesitant to let that happen. Think of having someone with a perfect memory following you around forever, but someone else has the ability to make them disappear. That's not a good situation.

    • One of the consequences of encountering a lot of LLM generated text which includes things the model vaguely remembers from its training is that honestly I have grown less tolerant even of human comments and documents that are based on mostly ‘I seem to recall that…’ level sourcing.

      In a discussion on economic history, say, someone will opine that Alexander Hamilton had some particular opinion about tariff policy… based on their having a vague memory of a blog post where someone quoted a passage in support of some point. But wait - you can search the federalist papers, the text’s right there to be read, before you commit to saying online ‘Hamilton thought tariffs were a great idea’ you could take your internal ‘I seem to recall reading something about hamilton’s opinion on tariffs’ thought and turn it into a little RAG query where you pull up a source and check before you put another factoid out onto the internet.

      And so I feel absolutely the same way about LLMs. I don’t care how much factual information was in the training data, when the LLM wants to rely on something it vaguely recalls having been trained on, it owes it to me to dig up a source and vet it.

      There are limits to this, of course. I don’t want it to be thinking ‘but wait, maybe my memory of Python syntax is faulty. Is = used for assignment? <web search>…’.

      But in general some caution about repeating vaguely recalled easily checked facts is warranted.

  • At 125B + 51B I'd expect it to have some degree of world knowledge, clearly in the middle between small models like qwen 27B, and huge trillion parameter models.

My AMD strix halo box (haven’t benchmarked yet) should also run it reasonably well. It was $1400 at launch, and is $4K now.

Your mac is < $2K in Biden-era dollars. Presumably the economy will eventually recover; maybe in one Moore’s law doubling if the midterms go outrageously well. That’ll be two doublings since the halo launched. I’d expect this model to run on a sub $1K box by then. $2K ought to get you a 512b parameter model at that point. If we have to wait out the rest of the term, the cost cliff will be even more pronounced when it hits.

  • I believe you're underestimating the lag inherent in the economy. Even if we grant the idea that the political party controlling the US House/Senate has a significant impact on the economy, and that the current party is BAD and the next one would be GOOD, I would still expect that things will continue getting WORSE for a good 4 to 8 years before they get better again.

    And that's even with assuming that we can continue to ignore the long-term problems like social security insolvency, the debt bomb, or climate change forever.

>Opus 4.6 Max self-hosted at 30 tok/s on a 5k Macbook in Aug 2026. The LLM timelines are crazy.

How much memory does this translate to and what quantization (if any) were applied?