The wait is finally over. One or two iterations, and I’ll be happy to say that language models are more than fulfilling my most common needs when self-hosting. Thanks to the Gemma team!
Now that coding agents are a thing my frame of reference has shifted to where I now consider a model that can be that my most common need. And unfortunately open models today cannot do that reliably. They might, like you said, be able to in a year or two, but by then the cloud models will have a new capability that I will come to regard as a basic necessity for doing software development.
All that said this looks like a great release and I'm looking forward to playing around with it.
It's a good balance between accuracy and memory, though in my experience, it's slower than older model architectures such as Llava. Just be aware Qwen-VL tends to be a bit verbose [2], and you can’t really control that reliably with token limits - it'll just cut off abruptly. You can ask it to be more concise but it can be hit or miss.
What I often end up doing and I admit it's a bit ridiculous is letting Qwen-VL generate its full detailed output, and then passing that to a different LLM to summarize.