> Qwen 3.8 27B is only the second local model after Gemma 4 that managed to correctly reason through one of my private benchmarks.
I don't expect you to blab publicly about your private benchmark, but what sorts of reasoning does it require?
I don't expect you to blab publicly about your private benchmark, but what sorts of reasoning does it require?
#1: it does not require deep world knowledge, because that's not what local models are for.
#2: it directly attacks drive-by understanding, overly linear processing training, poor attention mechanisms, poor reasoning patterns or lazy assumptions that ignore very easy low hanging fruit.
#3: it requires solid instruction following in the face of errors. a lot of models will run into errors and then fall back into some kind of error recovery process that bypasses instruction following.
#4: does not require prompt fine tuning to tweak to each individual model. they all seem to understand.
#5: not unfair. almost every model demonstrates in their reasoning that they have the necessary information that if reasoned about appropriately, could arrive at the correct answer.
#6: not designed to add unnecessary complication that it is intended to exhaust reasoning budgets of any sort, so it is not inherently unfair to models that reason a little more or less. for example, it does not require unnecessary reasoning soaks (ie: hiding the prompt inside base-64 encoding)
#7: has real world use and is probably applicable to overall ability to generalize.
#8: can be scaled up as models get better.
#9: is a very good indicator of how bad a model is falling apart under various inference settings.
I'm not asking anyone to take my word, they can believe or not and in practice people should be taking signals from a variety of places and doing their own testing to see how models behave in their own use cases. What I'm measuring and why I'm measuring it may not be the most important metric for your specific use case.
Most other models are simply failing at these tasks. I think the tasks are relevant to overall model capability, but they are not the only metric. You don't give a jellyfish a tool and expect it to produce wonders, so the other capabilities of the model matter.