Memdoor: A team of 5 Qwen3.8-27B models beats Fable 5 on LiveCodeBench Hard

289 pointsposted 14 hours ago
by guregodevo

142 Comments

fedpost

13 hours ago

We desperately need to keep local models competitive with the hyper scalers. I won't want to be beholden to them and their whims forever. With anthropic now restricting game reverse engineering I think we're about to cross a Rubicon of censorship.

canpan

13 hours ago

The nice thing is that current local modes don't go away. The weights are out. Qwen 27b and deepseek are already very useful. Hardware will keep getting stronger so after the current memory crisis you can run them more cheaply.

Of course the proprietary models will continue to improve and we have no guarantee that there will be new open models. But for coding, the local models are already good enough for a vast amount of use cases, if you are an experienced developer yourself and can guide it.

metalspot

2 hours ago

You don't need bigger or better models. Current models are more than adequate for any task.

The key thing is tool use.

The model is fixed but tool use introduces new information into the system, so once you have a model that is good enough to effectively use the full suite of tools available (debug, test, profile, etc) and write code to effectively combine them and synthesize their results for a particular task, there is nothing that it can't solve.

New models are continually ingesting new information from usage, and embedding the results from people running this process back into the base model, which makes it more efficient, gets more things right the first time, etc, but there is no step gap in functional outcomes left.

Computing and programming are a limited domain with a small fixed set of constructs that can be applied in an infinite number of combinations. Nothing ever closes the gap between the ability of the model to automate the assembly of these constructs and the necessity of expert human direction to pick what system to build out of the infinite range of possible systems.

Frontier models can keep producing very expensive one-shot demos to pitch to investors but they are never going to replace engineers.

matja

41 minutes ago

> local modes don't go away

On current GPU hardware/firmware... The cynic in me imagines in the future GPU vendors wanting to implement only loading signed weights to your card, aligned with your "subscription level", for your "safety".

chii

36 minutes ago

But the GPU vendors won't really have an incentive to do this - artificially restricting their customer base? Unless they and the hyperscalers all collude to cartel the market of course!

This is why it's so important to have more than one hardware vendor. The bigger the ecosystem, the harder it is to cartel. I cant believe it, but i am pinning my hopes on china to break through with commoditized chips and hardware.

rurban

an hour ago

But there is still the risk with qwen that they upload your private data to their homecloud. The model, not the agent!

I also switched to local qwen recently, but have to block such outgoing requests.

adrian_b

7 minutes ago

When you run inference yourself you have absolute control on what the model does.

The model itself is just dead weights, which cannot do any action by themselves.

All actions are done by your inference engine and harness, and you should take care about what you allow those to do.

pinyen_cheng

11 hours ago

I think the future should be efficient quantization which can make model with the same level as Qwen 3.8 27b now accessible from our laptop.

Moto7451

10 hours ago

This is mostly a memory bandwidth issue. Qwen 3.8 27b and the related Bonsai 2 27B run on my M5 Max laptop with 36GB of ram. It’s a little slow due to my specific model having lower memory bandwidth than higher end models with more ram and cores. MoE models perform better here and expert streaming engines can allow larger than memory models to run.

nout

10 hours ago

Multiple teams and efforts are now making Qwen 3.8 27b work much faster on Mac and CUDA and the inference speed is doubling almost every week. There's now ongoing competition about who will make it work faster with exactly the same byte output at https://mlx.fast . TensorFold is the project to follow.

raffraffraff

5 hours ago

So it's not about the model (eg TensorFold/Qwen3.8-27B-MLX-4bit) it's about the inference engine?

throwa356262

5 hours ago

The future is already here :)

These 3bit ISTA quants of qwen are supposed to be 95% as accurate as the full model and runs moothly on laptops:

https://huggingface.co/ISTA-DASLab/Qwen3.8-27B-GSQ-RCO-GGUF

There are multiple independent tests of this on YouTube.

latentsea

5 hours ago

They aren't "Just as accurate". What you see with these quants is the providers only ever show performance on already saturated benchmarks. You'll see labs put out 1-bit quants Deepseek v4.1 claiming only 1% degradation because they're only showing the benchmarks which tell that story. Then you look at the performance on those same benchmarks for significantly weaker models like Qwen3.8-27B even and it's virtually the same because that benchmark is saturated.

I like these quants as much as the next guy when they're all I can run but I have both R9700 with 32GB VRAM and a 5060 Ti with only 16GB VRAM and so I run both Q6 Unlsoth quants and ISTA IQ3_XXS quants and yeah there is an absolute world of difference in realworld performance.

IMHO I think it's pretty scummy behavior from the quant providers to frame these quants this way. Just be honest about where the degradation is really occurring on the non-saturated benchmarks.

starfallg

2 hours ago

This is a really good point that goes the other way as well. Some use cases are great for smaller and cheaper models, but it's not obviously when that's the case so I can bank the savings.

latentsea

15 minutes ago

Very much so. Probably a lot of compute is being wasted on using SOTA models for tasks that can be done on way, way weaker models.

bestham

4 hours ago

All I know is that Strata and these models are the most I have ever gotten out of my machine. I get 70 t/s on a standard gaming rig 9070 XT / 5900X / 64 GB DDR4 @3400.

latentsea

19 minutes ago

Yeah, they're surprisingly usable eventually. What I found running the Qwen3.8-Flash-Next IQ3_XXS on CUDA kernel development was, sure it generated faster t/s than 27B dense, but it generated so many more bugs, and when the quantization is lower the reasoning traces get longer. It was more or less always able to figure out what bugs it had made and fix them, but it took quite a lot of time to do. I switched back to Q6 on the dense model and that just went away for the most part. I recently upgraded to 128GB system RAM so that I can up to Q5 on Flash Next. Really excited for Qwen4-Flash when it comes out. Gonna be a real beast.

girvo

10 hours ago

Its possible (though very hard to do well, and needs a fair bit of compute) to improve the local models we have, too. Continued training is possible as time goes on.

Havoc

12 hours ago

>The nice thing is that current local modes don't go away.

Given pace of advance I'm not convinced this is a winning strategy. The models of today (open or not) are way smarter than those of a year ago.

...so we really do need open models to keep pace, not just be statically competitive at a given point in time

ashkankiani

12 hours ago

Even if Deepseek v4.1 is the last open source LLM I have access to, I would be perfectly fine with that. My secret is that I have this relatively unknown technique for solving problems where I use this quantum engine that developed from just atoms over 4.54 billion years into the most sophisticated machine in the known universe. It's a frontier model that every human has access too, actually.

So when I really want to solve a problem, I just think on it. And when I need something to iterate through the things I thought of quickly, I use deepseek.

thw_9a83c

8 hours ago

> Even if Deepseek v4.1 is the last open source LLM I have access to, I would be perfectly fine with that.

Your quantum engine aside, current open-source LLMs will not age well. They have a knowledge cutoff. If you ask them five years from now about something that didn't exist when they were trained, chances are they won't be able to provide a useful answer. They may still be useful for many applications, but their value will eventually deteriorate. Having continuous access to up-to-date open-weight LLMs is therefore about much more than simply having access to "better" models.

try-working

8 hours ago

we will soon figure out how to update the engrams with new information

thw_9a83c

8 hours ago

Yes, but first we need to figure out how to collect that new information. An efficient and ruthless data harvesting in one of the LLM labs secrets.

alfiedotwtf

17 minutes ago

A distributed, open scraper specifically for LLMs would be interesting . Filtering for spam and useless data would be a challenge at scale, but would be cool

edot

12 hours ago

Yep, fully satisfied with DS 4.1 Flash or GLM 5.3 Flash. I prefer using one chat at a time, actually thinking through things with it, as opposed to the YOLO run all night multi-agent thing. I mean I’m still okay with subagents if my main thread needs to explore a few options and then report back, but all on the same idea.

tomjuggler

5 hours ago

You might enjoy Cecli, the successor to Aider. It's made for the kind of workflow you are describing (full hands off yolo and recursive sub-agents also an option, but not the default)

cecli.dev

dd8601fn

5 hours ago

How are you running these? Not locally, I assume?

guregodevo

an hour ago

For this benchmark i 've been using OpenRouter. If you have enough RAM or you can ssh a cloud shell this intro https://memdoor.ai/docs/open-weight can work too. I have reached with the ssh door a Google Cloud Box where the 27B model ran with an L4 g2-standard-16. A inference engine server is setup easily with memdoor (https://github.com/guregodevo/janis) on any CPU or GPU box. Ideally i think we need a quorum of SSH boxes like this, distributed that you can ping with a mention such as @box:coder. It's WIP . Any suggestion for running a team of workers in remote machine is welcome. I'd like to find a cheap solution.

SequoiaHope

11 hours ago

The thing here for me is not that I’m unable to solve problems with my brain, it’s that I value the automation in labor provided by coding agents. I do not want future advancements to be locked behind proprietary doors.

ashkankiani

9 hours ago

I agree with that but the cat is out of the bag now. Unless you believe in exponential improvement (which I don’t), the open models might be at a resource disadvantage, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t catch up or surpass the closed ones. Throwing money at a problem doesn’t guarantee success.

I mainly just want to point out the value of human ingenuity coupled with a model like DS4.1 is technically enough to get most people to where they want to go, and that includes smarter open models.

duskdozer

4 hours ago

Then you probably don't want to be funding the companies that want and intend for it to be locked behind proprietary doors.

cortesoft

9 hours ago

You say that now, but you don't know what the future models will be capable of. If models get ridiculously good, you might not be perfectly fine with that.

ashkankiani

9 hours ago

I think at that point I’ll be doing carpentry instead of computing.

Obscurity4340

12 hours ago

How do you run DS 4.1 Flash if your computer isnt powerful and everything?

ashkankiani

12 hours ago

It can run on one strix halo machine, which is what I have. For everything else, there’s a vibrant community brute forcing more efficient engines and quantizations. There’s a minimum bar right now, so it depends on your hardware.

fooblaster

11 hours ago

you have 5k$ of ram in a strix halo?

ashkankiani

11 hours ago

I bought my box for $3k last year because I hadn't updated my PC since the first threadripper 1950x, and the Strix Halo is the only x86 with unified memory that's optimized for the kind of CPU intensive stuff I do, and they finally have proper AVX512 too. It was the perfect upgrade for me (except for lack of PCIe 5 & ECC), which coincidentally happened to be perfectly positioned for local inferrence.

and I liked it so much (and saw that the RAM drought was going to last for at least a few years) so I bought a second one to use as a general server for myself and my family.

Havoc

12 hours ago

The fact that you point to the latest model as „I’d be fine with that“ proves my point.

If expectations were static you’d be fine with qwen 2.5…but nobody sane says that today.

It’s a moving target thus we need open weights to move

user

11 hours ago

[deleted]

avazhi

10 hours ago

I’m all for local models and getting away from Anthropic/OAI but Qwen 27B might as well be a horse drawn carriage compared to a 2026 Porsche. Like, I guess it’s useful if you had nothing better but acting like it’s comparable to anything the frontier models have is just disingenuous.

jeffyaw

10 hours ago

disagree, it’s absolutely comparable. but an m5 max is where it shines. and there are 50 flags to finetune with llama server before you get it right. i do prefer llama server over mlx currently on mac as well.

rurban

an hour ago

What, I run it on 2 H100`s with vLLM and this is where it really shines. It's about half as good as Sonnet 5.5. On a small m5 max I can only assume trouble.

dontlaugh

10 hours ago

It’s so poor for most tasks that you’re faster doing it manually.

DeepSeek and GLM are useful, though. Even the flash variants.

jacquesm

9 hours ago

I have all three and you're not going to convince me of that.

Side-by-side Qwen 3.8 27B is ~6x as fast as DS4 and GLM 5.3 and faster than that if you get the speculative engine set up properly. That means you can iterate very rapidly on the same problem and for many problems this is the way to solve them. DS4 and GLM 5.3 shine when Qwen would take too many turns to solve something, they simply have more world knowledge and seem to home in on possible solutions faster in #tg but slower in wall clock time. If a particular problem is within striking range of all three then Qwen will usually be the fastest solver by far.

It also depends on how good your prompt is, whether you are setting up points for guidance or whether you expect everything to be solved in a single shot.

msdz

7 hours ago

> Side-by-side Qwen 3.8 27B is ~6x as fast as DS4 and GLM 5.3

Wow, that sounds like a lot! Do you use/mean the regular models or flash variants here?

jacquesm

7 hours ago

Specifically:

  5257408 DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731-UD-Q8_K_XL-00001-of-00005.gguf
  49215492960 DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731-UD-Q8_K_XL-00002-of-00005.gguf
  49700372160 DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731-UD-Q8_K_XL-00003-of-00005.gguf
  49466495968 DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731-UD-Q8_K_XL-00004-of-00005.gguf
  13481997024 DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731-UD-Q8_K_XL-00005-of-00005.gguf

  49842093280 GLM-5.3-Flash-Q3_XL-3.86bpw-00001-of-00004.gguf
  49644428576 GLM-5.3-Flash-Q3_XL-3.86bpw-00002-of-00004.gguf
  49653319264 GLM-5.3-Flash-Q3_XL-3.86bpw-00003-of-00004.gguf
  5694702080  GLM-5.3-Flash-Q3_XL-3.86bpw-00004-of-00004.gguf

  20437336576 qwen3_8_27b.ninfer
The GLM Quant is ~4 bpw, the DS4 is a Q8 and ninfer one is an NVFP4/BF16 I think. I run the ninfer one with ninfer-4090 on a hacked card with 48GB of VRAM. Max context for that one is 256K, DS4 has a 1M context and for GLM 5.3 it is 300K. The big models use all 8 GPUs.

Qwen benefits in two ways: all of the VRAM is on a single GPU so there is no communications other than generated tokens and new activations, that gives pretty good utilization for the card, the second is of course simply the fact that it is a much smaller model so there is less to compute. The 4090 is still power limited so it could do more but it's loud (and hot) enough as it is.

More details here:

https://jacquesmattheij.com/local-inference-with-large-langu...

metalspot

2 hours ago

bro, you are looking at a repo that shows you exactly how to use it to achieve better results than a frontier model

andai

9 hours ago

>Anthropic restricting game reverse engineering

Which is literally the coolest thing to come out of this...

Did they get a letter from Nintendo's legal team or something?

jimbob45

5 hours ago

It doesn’t matter, right? The open models should be capable of reversing anything prior to 2005, no?

Madmallard

an hour ago

What I find legitimately insane about all that is that Anthropic obviously does not have these censorship restrictions internally. So it's like.. They're just the whole world's adversary now?

philipallstar

3 hours ago

> I won't want to be beholden to them and their whims forever.

Who's keeping you beholden to them now?

walrus01

12 hours ago

Wait and see, I give it fairly high odds everything tagged as 'uncensored' or 'abliterated' will get wiped from huggingface at some point in the future. The main barrier to wider spread adoption of this right now is that very few people have the legit on-prem hardware resources/budget to run something like an abliterated Q8 of deepseek v4.1 flash 1017 or mimo 2.6 or equivalent in size locally.

1broseidon

11 hours ago

Doubt it. Even if HF drops them, it will not be hard for someone to move it to something like a decentralized torrent site dedicated to open source models.

Banning them would just invite competition which is why I think HF is holding out as long as they legally can.

dannyw

9 hours ago

Recently, HuggingFace has already taken down multiple models abliterated for cyber and with such descriptions, at their own initiative.

Example: https://huggingface.co/audnai/penclaw-GLM-5.3-abliterated-fo...

Previously, I recall HuggingFace only took models down if someone complained / sent a DMCA or cease and desist.

IronWolve

8 hours ago

check https://pirateface.co/ for llms removed by hf

SomeUserName432

4 hours ago

So they'll start branding them, "darknet models" or some such, and push for laws banning their use.

Punish the consumer, ala the copyright war since the 90s

Havoc

12 hours ago

>everything tagged as 'uncensored' or 'abliterated' will get wiped from huggingface at some point in the future.

Unlikely given how trivial it is to DIY this (I think...haven't myself but from afar it seems within avg hn crowd reach)

xpct

6 hours ago

Think about it this way: if new open source models come restricted where they refuse to run tasks related to abliteration, then even if public utility programs exist, it will already add a lot of friction to how many people will be capable of doing it. Now, if unverified models become outlawed and will move to more obscure hosting sites, that will add friction as well.

Especially as people grow more dependent on agents doing all of their computer work.

walrus01

12 hours ago

Yes, it'll likely just result in some people standing up a more dedicated purpose community hosting site of abliterated/uncensored open weight GGUF files. In a theoretical scenario where HF bans abliterated/uncensored models I could very well see the same people who are producing those now simply moving the location they upload stuff to.

To use an old analogy, it's not rocket science:

https://github.com/p-e-w/heretic

teaearlgraycold

12 hours ago

I was able to remove much of the CCP censorship from Qwen 3.8 27B for around $90 using a LoRA. I multiplied the LoRA in permanently and listed it on HuggingFace.

The cost was approximately $80 for generating synthetic data and $10 to create and integrate the LoRA.

Aurornis

9 hours ago

> I give it fairly high odds everything tagged as 'uncensored' or 'abliterated' will get wiped from huggingface at some point in the future

This is the kind of bet where I would take the opposite position without hesitation.

The only thing I could see them removing would be models that are specifically trained to do bad things, like a model trained to produce illicit underage image content. And I would be totally understanding of and encouraging of that, even if it makes the free speech absolutists unhappy.

I think the uncensored and abliterated models are more hype than actual threat. The journalists and politicians are too busy going after the AI labs every time someone does something bad and the police can find ChatGPT logs before it. I doubt we’re going to find a situation where someone was running local models and also keeping logs of everything and also commits a crime and also the journalists find it and also they make a story that catches on and so on.

It’s such a niche thing it’s just not a priority. There are some open LLM people who are treating it like a crisis before it happens, but come on. It’s the internet. We can download gigabytes of pirated TV shows despite that industry and lawmakers working hard to stop it for decades. If open models got banned somehow, you’d be able to download them the same way.

walrus01

9 hours ago

I didn't say they won't immediately move somewhere else or still be readily available. Just be taken off HF. It'll be a futile game of whack a mole for anyone trying ot stop it. The new corporate overlords at some point will face pressure. The 72GB 2160p HEVC copy of Apocalypse Now sitting on my home theatre file server which came from a well seeded torrent does indeed say that large file sizes of things that $bigcorp don't like will continue to be easily available.

girvo

10 hours ago

Applying Heretic to your model weights is a very straightforward thing, though.

user

11 hours ago

[deleted]

zaphirplane

10 hours ago

Hugging Face just hosts the models. Any hypothetical censorship on their end wouldn't stop you from running the original model provided directly by the builder.

sho

9 hours ago

> everything tagged as 'uncensored' or 'abliterated' will get wiped from huggingface

... you do know you can download from huggingface and make your own copy, right? And even if you couldn't, you could run heretic (or whatever approach they used) yourself on the official image. It's all just a well-understood process. A decent abliteration run on DS 4.1 flash will probably cost you about $25k.

They're not small but they're hardly out of reach. I have backups on my home NAS.

> very few people have the legit on-prem hardware resources/budget to run something like an abliterated Q8 of deepseek v4.1 flash 1017

It's something like $300-400/day for the raw hardware on RunPod, a little more on AWS. Not for home users, sure, but for a business wanting to eg check its security against the best of what attackers might bring, that's nothing. And it will go down.

CamperBob2

12 hours ago

The main barrier to wider spread adoption of this right now is that very few people have the legit on-prem hardware resources/budget to run something like an abliterated Q8 of deepseek v4.1 flash 1017

Not as bad as you might think. This costs about as much as a decent new car nowadays.

The abliterated 1017 release I've seen is crazy good.

walrus01

12 hours ago

I guess it depends if we're talking about decent new car at $40,000 or $95,000? I've seen lots of people claiming they're running v4.1 flash 1017 on local hardware but then it turns out it's something like the unsloth Q2 XXS or similar size. The Q8 is 508GB so assuming for a moment we're not running it on a Mac, we're looking at a cost of five or six 96GB GPUs to load the whole thing with a good sized full context and KV cache.

hgoel

10 hours ago

Haven't bothered with DS4.1 personally but I've seen reports of running it with native weights on 4x DGX Sparks. Currently ~$30k but last month that setup was ~$20k.

CamperBob2

12 hours ago

4x 96 GB runs the NVFP4 quants, which are indistinguishable from Q8 in real-world performance for this particular model. That's not always true but DeepSeek is unusually quantization-friendly. Also remember that a big chunk of the model consists of engrams that can live in system RAM or even on an SSD if necessary.

I imagine the various GGUFs are still pretty impressive, but haven't tried them myself.

KellyCriterion

12 hours ago

> new car

...which is still tooo much for most people to spend on "AI hardware"....

CamperBob2

12 hours ago

More like, the ability to chain a demon in your basement that does what you tell it and can't be rug-pulled by his bosses in San Francisco.

hgoel

9 hours ago

AI is the endgame for the joke that computing is the act of etching arcane signs into crystal and imbuing them with lightning.

walrus01

11 hours ago

Recently saw a hand drawn cartoon to the effect of, a person is asking Claude or chatgpt to do something, it refuses, so the next step is "make the Chinese one do it", and the Chinese model is represented as a chained demon

CamperBob2

11 hours ago

Just gotta make sure that pentagram is rock-solid!

james-bcn

3 hours ago

Yes it is extremely aggravating that Claude will often raise copyright objections even when doing something like putting images in a report for personal use. The AI companies are the most blatant copyright abusers in history.

znpy

3 hours ago

> We

who is "we" exactly? because the vast majority of us (pretty much everybody except people working at at hyperscalers that are not the usual hyperscalers) can essentially do nothing.

mrkeen

6 hours ago

Did we ever get back to 16GB feasibility?

AFAIK the timeline was:

  - AI was shit, models could fit in your GPU
  - AI was shit, models could no longer fit in your GPU
  - AI got good
Any chance a good model will ever be seen in a consumer GPU again?

exe34

3 hours ago

Sonnet 5.5 refused to implement code using selenium/firefox to scrape a webpage on my laptop after we got a 403 from a cloud-based IP. I made that clanker generate datasets for the rest of the week to use up my weekly usage that would have been wasted.

roenxi

13 hours ago

That's pretty interesting, because with the Bonsai 2 quantisations it is quite achievable to get Qwen 27B running at 50 t/s on reasonably priced gaming machine [0]. Which in turn suggests that Fable 5 coding performance can be achieved locally with a bit of clever harnessing.

Although the same harnessing should also improve Fable's performance. The important thing here is the cap for local performance looks like it could be quite high.

[0] https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw... suggests 16GB VRAM, 32 GB system.

Aurornis

9 hours ago

> because with the Bonsai 2 quantisations it is quite achievable to get Qwen 27B running at 50 t/s on reasonably priced gaming machine

The Bonsai quantizations are not good for real work. I have tried them. They are as bad as you would expect from 2-bit quants. They may have done a good job quantizing to that limit, but it’s still bad.

Even the 4-bit Qwen3.8 27B quants are still iffy for coding work. It’s not until Q5 or Q6 that I find them useful, which is too bad because that cuts into available context on 32GB cards.

> Which in turn suggests that Fable 5 coding performance can be achieved locally with a bit of clever harnessing.

I experiment with a lot of local inference engines and I also use both Fable and Astra. I wish this was true, but it’s just not. I can generate tens of millions of Qwen3.8 tokens per day and run the hardware nonstop, but even brute forcing it like this just can’t accomplish the same thing that I can get Astra, Fable, or even Opus and Sol to get done in an hour or less most of the time. You just cannot make up for the lack of intelligence built into the model by brute force unless maybe your timeline extends to infinity.

IsTom

2 hours ago

OTOH how much compute does Astra, Fable or Opus use? Is it just 24 times (1 vs 24 hour runtime) more than 27B Qwen?

SwellJoe

13 hours ago

Bonsai 2-bit quantization is notably dumber than Qwen 27B at eight bits or even four bits. I doubt you'll get this level of quality even with five of them.

MrDrMcCoy

13 hours ago

Dumber yes, but not by all that much. If the multiple agent thing really improves the quality by as much as is described here, the quality loss should be nearly imperceptible.

Aurornis

9 hours ago

I’ve tried the Bonsai quants specifically because I want to run a lot of parallel requests.

The swarm strategy can’t overcome the dumbed down model problem. You just end up with your swarm of agents all going in the same dumbed down loops.

andai

5 hours ago

Throwing Ralphs at the wall in parallel

reverius42

3 hours ago

Except every single Ralph ends up curled up in the fetal position having accomplished nothing?

SwellJoe

13 hours ago

I think that requires testing, rather than assuming. There's only so far a harness can go.

phantompeace

12 hours ago

Not sure if I agree. Remember the error rates stack up every turn of the conversation. If a 2bit model is 10% more wrong than the fp16 version, over 10 turns that adds up

Havoc

12 hours ago

The bonsai quants are not that awesome. Yeah they're fast and they retain the "27B" but in practice the perform similarly

5GB of bonsai weights end up being similar to 5GB of QAT weights even when one is derived from a 27B and the other from an 8B

nicce

13 hours ago

Bonsai 2 has a bit different architecture as far I understand and speculative decoding is not so great yet. Before that point, original model is faster if you have the memory. Would be nice to see the speed with proper speculative decoder.

xlayn

13 hours ago

Remember those gpus into chips https://inference-docs.cerebras.ai/models/qwen-3.8-27b , where you have this chip that implements a model that run at those extremely high speeds... the ones that people ask "why do we need that"... if this is true... one of those chips with the correct harness is all that's needed to get fable like intelligence in every single computer in this planet...

Happy hallowen Tax Ramltman and Amowhateverwayyournameiswritten...

guregodevo

13 hours ago

Happy hallowen! ::::

Actually we tried Cerebras. It caps output at 32K tokens so the 128K reasoning (the author budget) didn't fit. Cerebras speed is real though

mkl

13 hours ago

GVS5H, which this is based on, was discussed here a week ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50228167

vikramkr

10 hours ago

I was getting deja vu. Copy paste my comment from that thread to here I guess. Apparently it's really easy to get Internet points by making up a harness and showing that good open source models can do as well as the frontier, you know, on useless saturated and contaminated benchmarks from years ago that don't reflect any of the agentic work we actually use these models for. It's so stupid because these models are at the level of a decent non fable frontier model from 3-6 months ago and it's also cool that you could probably get equal perf to gpt 5.5 from qwen 3.9 27b or gpt 5.6 sol/opus 5 from a quantized DeepSeek or glm 5.3 flash. Those models were pretty useful in their time! Instead we have whatever this new form of harness/benchmark slop is

guregodevo

13 hours ago

Here the intent is to replicate GVS5H with memdoor a headless coding agent I created months ago. Anyone can reshape the harness by redefining the steps in yaml files , models and temperatures. Up to you guys to try you have the recipe in this repo.

vikramkr

10 hours ago

How does it do on a more modern benchmark? Was harsh towards this in my other comment but that's a combination of this benchmark is useless, and also these open source models are pretty good and there might actually be real utility to good custom harnesses tuned for them that's getting ignored because the parity with the frontier on a saturated and contaminated benchmark makes for better headlines. I'd be curious if there's anything with these types of harnesses that make them work for realistic/relevant workflows

zihotki

12 hours ago

I'd wait for more benchmarks before making any conclusions since this benchmark has only "The first ten problems of their LiveCodeBench Hard list". And LiveCodeBench Hard is a several years old benchmark. Could be very saturated

yurimo

8 hours ago

There is something to say about the power of brute force approaches. Right now scaling multi agent is seemingly what is becoming the next important axis, though very strongly constrained by quality of communication protocol and compute. Even if one model is not strong enough individually, more models and more attempts as well as differing opinions may nudge the models into a better solution basins.

Kind of an extension of the effect where you talk to a model, it is super confident (but wrong), you correct it not directly but perhaps with a question and asking it to clarify. This then in turn leads to a better approach overall.

vrinsd

6 hours ago

Maybe slightly off-topic from the main article but is there a good resource or site that clearly helps understand which of the "open" models are good for programming tasks, like C, C++, Python, Java?

I've looked and there are tons of sites that aggregate models vs. benchmarks but I'm not sure how much of that is trust worthy.

74948494i4

12 hours ago

This is good timing. My setup at home involves a two servers with 5080s each and an Rtx spark laptop with 128gb. I plan I have qwen flash next on the latter and the 27b variant on the former. I would’ve preferred to have purchased a dgx spark but everything is just ridiculously expensive now. My own setup would be 3x the cost to buy again.

I’m mainly trying to replicate Gemini flash and muse agent for my family of 4 without breaking the bank (already had a 5080 for gaming and the other for image gen).

It is unclear if this memdoor works for agentic tasks, e.g.: “check daily if dune 3 tickets are for sale and if they are buy tickets for 4 where all 4 seats are next to each other in the same row and as center as possible.”

There is a huge cliff once you go past 128gb. Basically you need either Rtx 6000 pros (20k+) or a cluster of dgx sparks (15k+)

CharlieDigital

an hour ago

    > Five small models solve a programming problem together: a planner, two ideators, a solver and a manager, plus a repair worker. Each starts from a fresh context and talks only through files on disk. 
This seems to tie back to the paper Adaptive Auto-Harness: Sustained Self-Improvement for Agentic System Deployment on Open-Ended Task Streams[0].

In the Emory paper:

    > We reduce this loss by expanding Φ with a stateful four-phase multi-agent evolver, temporal-reveal feedback, and cross-cycle memory. This design targets the unbounded-stream failure where a single-agent evolver must absorb growing trajectories, delayed labels, and prior research within one context window
TL;DR: the solution approach uses "multi-agent evolution" and "multi-agent with distinct roles and objectives" for "solve-time adaptation" and improves performance with streams of heterogeneous tasks. The Emory team overall has congruent findings:

    > The experiments further show that...multi-agent evolution constructs benchmark-specific capabilities
Intuitively, the reason this works seems to be simple: multiple agents results in context spread to each agent by specific role. Each agent role only outputs the final, relevant result and not the noisy thinking tokens, tool calls, etc. so subsequent agents get smaller, more focused context, auto-adapting to each new task with prompt refinement at each step as the solution approach emerges.

4 weeks back I switched over to Paseo and started using the agent profiles on a whim and have observed similar outcomes and behavior (seat of the pants): the win in my use case is that it feels like I can get higher autonomy without sacrificing quality (less input from me required to get quality output). The Emory paper and this team-solve seem to reinforce that role-based, multi-agent setups can improve solve performance.

For the curious, I shared a bit of my setup in a blog post[1]

[0] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2606.01770

[1] https://chrlschn.dev/blog/2026/10/larping-with-agents-and-wh...

bad_haircut72

7 hours ago

This is probably not a novel idea but I wonder how it would work if you just stacked a bunch of smaller models on top of eachother and used that as the base to train a much much larger model. Maybe more efficient than starting from scratch?

vessenes

7 hours ago

This working journal is so much slop it’s basically impossible to read. Perhaps the author could write a short human written and readable summary so we can evaluate if this is interesting or not.

guregodevo

4 hours ago

This is a benchmark that solves ten hard problems in five passes. It scores 9.8 against the authors' 9.6 and Fable 5's 8.0. Memdoor workflows are the harness that replicates the original GVS5H thread harness posted in HN last week. Raw results (i.e. each call's tokens, cost and host) are in the bench folder for verification.

cloudking

10 hours ago

Benchmarks are one thing, but I've yet to see anything substantial actually built with local models. Most of the posts on X are about benchmarks and tok/s. Has anyone actually built a quality production app or game with real users?

simoncion

9 hours ago

Well, Greg KH emphatically states that local LLMs are more than good enough for bug finding in the Linux Kernel. [0] Seems strong enough for the task to me. [1]

He goes on to recommend that one uses local LLMs exclusively for bug finding because he and his colleagues have seen multiple occasions where folks who used the LLMs provided by the Major LLM Manufacturers had the stuff they were working on get "mysteriously" leaked.

Even if that sort of thing were not known to happen, it's just smart to not process data you want to keep secret in systems that are known to straight up retain user data and/or "anonymize" user data and send it back to their HQ for use in production of newer versions of their products.

[0] IIRC, it is this video: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnV_cWeoo5Q>

[1] And even if they're six months behind the latest publicly-available tools provided by the Major LLM Manufacturers, six months ago a notable subset of folks were on here screaming that their latest tools enabled fully-automated hands-off coding and had ushered in an era of Software Factories that were rapidly going to make all programmers obsolete. ;)

Scaled

3 hours ago

I am having pretty good success with DeepSeek 0731 locally. I have vibe coded some small things like an orchestrator. For a production product with real users, I will let it do first passes on code which I then review and polish up. I'm not oneshotting, but it's still a workflow benefit.

trog

7 hours ago

I've built an RSS reader and I'm doing a half assed reverse engineer / web version of Tapped Out (a silly little Simpsons mobile game that EA killed a while back). I've had to go to Claude a couple times when it got stuck on something curly, but I think that was mostly just loading a fresh context and I could have solved it I'd I really tried.

I've been using Qwen 3.8 and more recently Next for the last two months almost exclusively on home projects (I have access to a system with an RTX 6000 for free). It does everything I want it to! I have no issues believing it would be fine for more than just pet projects.

sjdh76

8 hours ago

Well in large corp this takes time, even if you have an army of Einsteins at your disposal (just like we saw with Elons Doge) because there will be 16 different spreedsheets/dbs talking abt the state of the system that all contradict each other. While the 6 people who maintain their own state to keep the lights on, will have job titles that have nothing to do with system state maintenance.

Small companies its hit or miss cuz they are overwhelmed by the pace of change. Basically no one wants to hear things will take time. Intelligence is just one system variable and others dont just auto sync.

jacmilts

2 hours ago

Why such an old benchmark?

user

14 hours ago

[deleted]

walrus01

13 hours ago

I'd like to see this done with qwen 3.8-flash-next (Q8 or full precision) which beats 3.8-27B on just about every coding/command line use benchmark. In particular comparisons like terminalbench 4.0.

https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/comparisons/qwen3-8-fla...

guregodevo

13 hours ago

will definitively try it. Overall with a smarter model the improvement is in the token usage and latency. Tbh I think i could get a 10 score if i tuned the prompt and temperature a little more. The original author harness is already giving 9.6 score which is pretty good. However this harness loop can take more than 1 hour on the hardest problem at 100 token /sec. A smarter model such as 3.8-flash-next could get 10 score and resolve the hardest problem faster. That's my estimate i'll give it a try. Thx

wredcoll

8 hours ago

This is somewhat tangential but speaking of ai benchmarks, I want to see one benchmarkes against passing those "filelocker" websites used for illicit downloads.

You know, the kind with 50+ ads on the page and 8 of them say download and you have to click it 5 times to get past the ads then do that on two more pages?

BrandoDev_it

12 hours ago

I can't wait for qwen4 flash next or something like a 150b moe from qwen.

topspin

12 hours ago

So far, the comments have focused on hopes for the effectiveness of open-weight models versus proprietary frontier models. That's fine, but I'm thinking about the approach and the results, as opposed to the model.

Taking the results at face value, what is it about the "team" that makes the system so effective? That's the key here: presumably, the approach should work regardless of the model, open-weight or otherwise.

My guess would be that the division of labor makes the separate contexts more effective. This is an optimization around the limits of context. Some of that is simply the net amount of context brought to bear: each team member has a context, so the net amount of context is multiplied by the number of team members. Also, since the division limits the scope of each team member's focus, the context a team member has is used more effectively.

edg5000

7 hours ago

I would not think in terms of "how much" context, but really just how the harness manages it. I've been fiddling around with harnesses earlier this year and the rabbit hole goes very deep. I eventually had to drop it because it consumed me, and I can only do one thing well. But what I learned is that there is a lot on the table at the harness level.

The elephant in the room and the constant tension is that the models do get "used" to a certain harness (trained for it by the model labs), but they also generalize well. So one really advanced mechanism could fall short because the model could fail to generalize, whereas in other cases the model might handle large deviations from how a conventional harness works better than expected. This is where the gains are.

BrandoDev_it

12 hours ago

Fable 5 is not anymore frontier and even if, I hardly believe five very small 27b models can do like Fable 5. I think this is whishful thinking more than a fact

ra

12 hours ago

"think", "believe" - maybe, but this is why we need better measurability.

0xbadcafebee

11 hours ago

So someone used a small model with many requests & a massive amount of tokens, to eventually beat a large model with a single request & tiny amount of tokens. .....Cool? Were they not expecting that to work?

exe34

an hour ago

Plenty of people above are explaining why that wouldn't work. Basically 100x idiots don't always add up to one mediocre <noun>.

m3kw9

12 hours ago

can it bet a team of 5 fable 5's?

user

10 hours ago

[deleted]

anonimus664jaja

7 hours ago

Descargar 5!=</ Extractor CARTA-DE-AMOR-PARA-TI...XTS.VBS