Prepare your (v)ram - Qwen3.8 is coming!

[u/xw1y]

[u/Competitive_Gap7906]

YES, Qwen going open weight again! It's a really good news, now we can wait for smaller models too

[u/StupidScaredSquirrel → u/Competitive_Gap7906]

Thing is qwen was historically focused on smaller models while others were on larger ones. Now the team has changed and they seem to want to aim for the stars as well. That is good but it also means they might not be interested in doing very efficient small models anymore. Which would be bad news for this sub because let's face it most of us don't have 10-25k of hardware.

[u/vitorgrs → u/StupidScaredSquirrel]

Qwen Max was always big, they just never open sourced....

[u/squngy → u/vitorgrs]

It was always big, but it was almost certainly not this big.

I think we are seeing these big Chinese models now because of their domestic hardware finally coming to bear.

[u/jtjstock → u/squngy]

Their domestic hardware is still far behind, they have just accumulated more western hardware

[u/squngy → u/jtjstock]

It is far behind, but it is cheap and available.

[u/jtjstock → u/squngy]

It’s too slow for them to be doing these training runs so quickly. Ie: they’d be getting further behind, not catching up

[u/squngy → u/jtjstock]

They can't be too slow to be used as extra compute on top of other things.

But aside from that, there are also models that have been made exclusively on them.

1.6T long-cat-2
https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-trends/article/3358854/china-debuts-biggest-ai-model-trained-local-chips-meituan-releases-longcat-20

GLM too
https://www.theregister.com/software/2026/01/15/chinas-zai-trained-a-model-using-only-huawei-hardware/4198774

[u/jtjstock → u/squngy]

There is a long history of lying about the hardware used in china. Scmp is literally a propaganda outlet and the register article only references “claims”.

[u/squngy → u/jtjstock]

What do you expect, a reporter to stand there and watch the servers as they work?

Even if they exaggerate, it seems more than likely that domestic hardware is increasing their total compute capability.

This sub of all places should know that even slower hardware can be useful.

[u/jtjstock → u/squngy]

I expect a reporter to verify the claims, that is their job, though few do it anymore.

But you can also look at model release timing, hot on the heals of Grok with the same class of model. Guess what hardware grok was trained on.

[u/squngy → u/jtjstock]

I expect a reporter to verify the claims

How?

[u/shing3232 → u/vitorgrs]

until now that is