I've been playing around with K3 a bunch, but the verbosity of the reasoning makes complete e2e agent work basically cost the same as other smaller models, and I'm not seeing a huge difference in quality, just a way longer e2e completion time.
Same problem with every chinese model currently, they overthink way too much and take too much tokens and time.
A consequence of aggressive distillation?
More or less, yeah. I've found mild success with deepseek-v4-flash though, and also Qwen3.5-122B-A10B-NVFP4 running locally, especially in terms of "doesn't overthink every single prompt" and somewhat reasonable quality. Really wishing for a 3.8 update of the 122B variant, that'd be really competitive (for local usage) :)
Why? Price? If the reason is performance, I've been using non-frontier models for cheap, and they run great for my needs (GLM 5.2, DeepSeek v4 Pro).
We'll probably use it, but for images. Qwen is still the best for images