So back in the Qwen 3.5 release, the 122B-A10B model scored slightly better than the 27B model. I'd expect this new 125B-A6B to perform similarly to the recently released 27B. Qwen3.8 27B is supposed to rival Sonnet/Opus 4.6.
The only reason I stopped using it as much is I was getting 25-35tok/s on Intel B70 (non-quant) which made some responses slow. For a long running/autonomous task, it would probably be sufficient.
- check your temp settings vs. Qwen's recommendations, they specify what it should be in the model card for thinking on, and that reduces some "over" think.
- the model appears to be intentionally designed to do a lot more test-time compute, if you anthropomorphize the tokens, it looks like overthinking and anxiety, but it is just spending compute to get to the end result, so it may not actually help it to prompt down the token spend (depending on the problem)
If you follow that formula, you would expect a 125b-a6b model to match a 27b model (sqrt(125*6) = 27.3). That does not feel like a coincidence
It's obviously just a rough approximation. Actual scaling laws suggested in published papers are a lot more complex, and even then you run into issues (architecture changes, effects like better training, putting intelligence on a one-dimensional axis is stupid in the first place, etc). But as an approximation it holds up pretty well for normal-ish ratios between active and total parameters
4.6 ~= 4.8
4.7 much worse.
Fable and newer consistently tells me to pound sand, so I’m not sure what I’m paying $200/month for. 4.8 sometimes does too, but it’s at least usable most of the time.
So, I’d expect this to mostly replace Claude for my workflows. The main tradeoff for me should mostly be token throughput vs. no longer really trusting anthropic.