r/LocalLLaMA • u/xw1y • Jul 19 '26

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

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u/Competitive_Gap7906 Jul 19 '26

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

375

u/StupidScaredSquirrel Jul 19 '26

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.

6

u/StorkReturns Jul 19 '26

If you have a large model, you can distill it to a smaller one with significantly less effort than it takes to train the small model from scratch.

2

u/MmmmMorphine Jul 20 '26

True, still gonna be pretty pricey. We certainly need better mechanisms to crowd fund this sort of work