3 ms·

Wowzers, we were worried Qwen was going to suffer having lost several high profile people on the team but that's a huge drop. It's better than 27b?

adrian_b 5mo ago
Their previous model Qwen3.5 was available in many sizes, from very small sizes intended for smartphones, to medium sizes like 27B and big sizes like 122B and 397B. This model is the first that is provided with open weights from their newer family of models Qwen3.6. Judging from its medium size, Qwen/Qwen3.6-35B-A3B is intended as a superior replacement of Qwen/Qwen3.5-27B. It remains to be seen whether they will also publish in the future replacements for the bigger 122B and 397B models. The older Qwen3.5 models can be also found in uncensored modifications. It also remains to be seen whether it will be easy to uncensor Qwen3.6, because for some recent models, like Kimi-K2.5, the methods used to remove censoring from older LLMs no longer worked.
- mft_ 5mo ago
  There was also Qwen3.5-35B-A3B in the previous generation: https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3.5-35B-A3B https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3.5-35B-A3B
- storus 5mo ago
  > Qwen/Qwen3.6-35B-A3B is intended as a superior replacement of Qwen/Qwen3.5-27B Not at all, Qwen3.5-27B was much better than Qwen3.5-35B-A3B (dense vs MoE).
  - mudkipdev 5mo ago
    Re-read that
    - storus 5mo ago
      You should. 3.5 MoE was worse than 3.5 dense, so expecting 3.6 MoE to be superior than 3.5 dense is questionable, one could argue that 3.6 dense (not yet released) to be superior than 3.5 dense.
      - spuz 5mo ago
        Ok but you made a claim about the new model by stating a fact about the old model. It's easy to see how you appeared to be talking about different things. As for the claim, Qwen do indeed say that their new 3.6 MoE model is on a par with the old 3.5 dense model: > Despite its efficiency, Qwen3.6-35B-A3B delivers outstanding agentic coding performance, surpassing its predecessor Qwen3.5-35B-A3B by a wide margin and rivaling much larger dense models such as Qwen3.5-27B. https://qwen.ai/blog?id=qwen3.6-35b-a3b https://qwen.ai/blog?id=qwen3.6-35b-a3b
        storus 5mo ago
        This says a slightly different thing: https://x.com/alibaba_qwen/status/2044768734234243427?s=48&t=UC-qvMtNVy9tTiWjYuLgeg https://x.com/alibaba_qwen/status/2044768734234243427?s=48&t... If you look, at many benchmarks the old dense model is still ahead but in couple benchmarks the new 35B demolishes the old 27B. "rivaling" so YMMV.
  - rubiquity 5mo ago
    Not sure why you're being downvoted, I guess it's because how your reply is worded. Anyway, Qwen3.7 35B-A3B should have intelligence on par with a 10.25B parameter model so yes Qwen3.5 27B is going to outperform it still in terms of quality of output, especially for long horizon tasks.
segmondy 5mo ago
This is obviously a continuation training of 3.5, it's not a new model architecture but an incremental improvement.

adrian_b 5mo ago

Their previous model Qwen3.5 was available in many sizes, from very small sizes intended for smartphones, to medium sizes like 27B and big sizes like 122B and 397B. This model is the first that is provided with open weights from their newer family of models Qwen3.6. Judging from its medium size, Qwen/Qwen3.6-35B-A3B is intended as a superior replacement of Qwen/Qwen3.5-27B. It remains to be seen whether they will also publish in the future replacements for the bigger 122B and 397B models. The older Qwen3.5 models can be also found in uncensored modifications. It also remains to be seen whether it will be easy to uncensor Qwen3.6, because for some recent models, like Kimi-K2.5, the methods used to remove censoring from older LLMs no longer worked.

mft_ 5mo ago
There was also Qwen3.5-35B-A3B in the previous generation: https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3.5-35B-A3B https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3.5-35B-A3B
storus 5mo ago
> Qwen/Qwen3.6-35B-A3B is intended as a superior replacement of Qwen/Qwen3.5-27B Not at all, Qwen3.5-27B was much better than Qwen3.5-35B-A3B (dense vs MoE).
- mudkipdev 5mo ago
  Re-read that
  - storus 5mo ago
    You should. 3.5 MoE was worse than 3.5 dense, so expecting 3.6 MoE to be superior than 3.5 dense is questionable, one could argue that 3.6 dense (not yet released) to be superior than 3.5 dense.
    - spuz 5mo ago
      Ok but you made a claim about the new model by stating a fact about the old model. It's easy to see how you appeared to be talking about different things. As for the claim, Qwen do indeed say that their new 3.6 MoE model is on a par with the old 3.5 dense model: > Despite its efficiency, Qwen3.6-35B-A3B delivers outstanding agentic coding performance, surpassing its predecessor Qwen3.5-35B-A3B by a wide margin and rivaling much larger dense models such as Qwen3.5-27B. https://qwen.ai/blog?id=qwen3.6-35b-a3b https://qwen.ai/blog?id=qwen3.6-35b-a3b
      - storus 5mo ago
        This says a slightly different thing: https://x.com/alibaba_qwen/status/2044768734234243427?s=48&t=UC-qvMtNVy9tTiWjYuLgeg https://x.com/alibaba_qwen/status/2044768734234243427?s=48&t... If you look, at many benchmarks the old dense model is still ahead but in couple benchmarks the new 35B demolishes the old 27B. "rivaling" so YMMV.
- rubiquity 5mo ago
  Not sure why you're being downvoted, I guess it's because how your reply is worded. Anyway, Qwen3.7 35B-A3B should have intelligence on par with a 10.25B parameter model so yes Qwen3.5 27B is going to outperform it still in terms of quality of output, especially for long horizon tasks.

segmondy 5mo ago

This is obviously a continuation training of 3.5, it's not a new model architecture but an incremental improvement.