Hacker News Reader

Comment by seanmcdirmid | Hacker News Reader

I've benched 3.8 27B being significantly slower and less quality than 3.6 35B-A4B (both 4-bit quant, MTP, both using turboquant 4-bit served by oMLX), to the point that I'm not even using it right now (on an M3 Max). What's your use case and what did you observe? I might be missing something.

View on HN

I believe you mean 35B-A3B, there was no such thing as A4B. I use 27B and other models for software development, and quite a few research or similar agents. I cannot imagine a world where the old 35B-A3B model is smarter / more capable than 3.8 27B - the difference is night and day for coding at least. Where 35B-A3B was fast and felt like a Haiku model, 27B feels like a strong Sonnet when given the right tools. I don't use turbo quant so can't comment on that, but with the A3B model you're using you probably won't get much from using MTP with small MoE models like that.

People over-quantize things, muck with the temperature and other settings based on superstitions or results from models they think are similar. There's lots of ways to make 3.8 27B dumber.

I've had great success with allowing the model to review optimal settings and my system specs. It comes up with the right configuration. Running Pi harness. I just had Ornith 1.5 take a moment to configure itself, now it's reviewing a large project I'm working on, so far its really impressive for my needs. Qwen3.8 27b Unsloth(Dynamic 3.0) is also perfect. These two are working together, and I'm in a sweet-spot, I now have all I need.

Yes, A3B, sorry for the typo. I’ve benched it and used it in practice for agentic coding, and I haven’t seen any benefit to it yet. Lightning MTP helps a lot in the perf department.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com