Chinese open-weight AI models offer high capability at significantly lower costs than U.S. frontier systems, but face monetization and compute challenges, experts said at a Rest of World event in San Francisco.
It’s worse than that even… frontier models now have guardrails restrictive enough that I can’t use them for legitimate work. And the ones that DO work have token prices at exorbitant rates, and chew through them like there’s no tomorrow.
Meanwhile, I can download Qwen3 and run it on my own hardware, and it’s about as good as the last generation US model without the annoying guardrails.
It’s a mixed bag TBH. The issue is that Qwen 3.8 27B is so good.
It depends on the quant you are running though, and the way you are running it. If you have 16GB or less VRAM and a generous amount of CPU RAM, and you are running a regular GGUF instead of something exotic, Qwen next is probably better, with the right hybrid inference engine.
It’s worse than that even… frontier models now have guardrails restrictive enough that I can’t use them for legitimate work. And the ones that DO work have token prices at exorbitant rates, and chew through them like there’s no tomorrow.
Meanwhile, I can download Qwen3 and run it on my own hardware, and it’s about as good as the last generation US model without the annoying guardrails.
Hmm… which model am I going to choose to use?
Did you mean qwen 3.8 max? Or qwen 3 coder next? They are very different.
I mean both, for different purposes. They are definitely very different.
I’ve been rocking Qwen 3.8 27b for programming, anyone have an opinion if Coder Next is a better alternative?
It’s a mixed bag TBH. The issue is that Qwen 3.8 27B is so good.
It depends on the quant you are running though, and the way you are running it. If you have 16GB or less VRAM and a generous amount of CPU RAM, and you are running a regular GGUF instead of something exotic, Qwen next is probably better, with the right hybrid inference engine.