Qwen3.7-Max: The Agent Frontier
qwen.ai64 points by kevinsimper 2 hours ago
64 points by kevinsimper 2 hours ago
As they start to release more proprietary models, I so wish that they partnered with one of the major US hyperscalers to allow using these models through something US-domiciled.
Totally understand why it may not be reasonable or in their best interest (and that the US is _absolutely_ not doing the same reflexively). But it would be lovely to be able to try these out on production workloads in earnest.
Can anyone check its knowledge base for me? I’m honestly not able to run it and the Qwen models I can run censor information critical towards the Chinese government.
Tiananmen Square is the first place to start.
Looking forward to more open weight releases from Qwen, especially 122B and 397B.
Yeah that 60-150b~ range is such a sweet spot for current 'prosumer' hardware, I'd love to see something like a 120b-a14b or there about.
I have a 128G mac studio and even 397B was a happy surprise to me due to its high quantization resilience.
I've created a 2.54BPW quant that fit on my hardware with 128k context, 20 tps tg and 200tps pp, while maintaining high scores on many benchmarks: https://huggingface.co/tarruda/Qwen3.5-397B-A17B-GGUF/discus...
better than antirez ds4 ?
I only tried a very early version of that when it was just a llama.cpp fork and Qwen was certainly better in my tests.
But I was not super impressed with deepseek 4 flash using it from the official API either, so it doesn't seem quantization fault. It is a good model, but nothing out of the ordinary in the few benchmarks I ran on it (with full awareness that benchmarks are biased).
What’s the price point for getting into that sweet spot?
I’m on an M1 Max with 32GB VRAM, so I’m looking forward to the 27B or 35B-A3B models. Is dropping $5k for an RTX 6000 or a DGX Spark really the best option?
If I could find a RTX Pro 6000 for $5K I'd definitively grab it, I'm running RedHatAI/Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-NVFP4 on one (I had to pay closer to $10K for it though) with 260K context and it's a blast! ds4 by antirez also works well, even IQ2XXS seems to work relatively well but Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-NVFP4 is both faster and higher quality responses (at least for coding and translations which I use them mostly for).
Expect to pay $4k-10k
- Your RTX 6000 is closer to $10k now
- Sparks are creeping into the $4-5k range
- AMD Strix are ~3.5k
- Apple depends on chipset and memory. Sweet spot would be 128gb M3 Ultra, probably $6-8k but admittedly haven't been tracking closely. New M5 might come in the fall. You can get a new 128gb M5 Max laptop for ~5-6k today.
- a 4x3090 rig would take $5-6k
Every platform has tradeoffs, but it's mostly ecosystem, memory bandwidth, and power consumption. They're all slow. The best option is likely to rent hardware on Runpod. The RIO on self-hosting is very low unless you have a specific need or you're ok treating it as a hobby.
Bosgame M5 (Strix Halo) w/ 128 GB still goes for $2800 right now. SH systems have surged in price dramatically but quite unevenly.
> What’s the price point for getting into that sweet spot?
In October/2024 I got my Mac studio M1 ultra with 128G, IIRC it was ~$2500. With recent prices explosion, it has certainly gotten more expensive. https://frame.work/ is selling 128G strix halo mainboard for $2700, but you have to add storage and case.
M5 Max 64GB (sweet spot) or 128GB (only 1000 USD, better to keep it for the future) more are the best quality price ratio, future proof, reliable, resellable and flexible workloads. Harder to use as a server might be the only drawback
What do you recommend for non-Mac setup? I am a Mac user, but its getting expensive, and not seeing reason to jump to the latest M5
Strix Halo at $2k with similar TG and about half the PP of DGX Spark was a pretty good deal IMO, especially considering it's also a full x86 system... 16c/32t Zen 5, 40 CU RDNA 3.5, 128 GB unified memory at ~220 GB/s real-world speeds (256 GB/s theoretical) - that runs full tilt at 140W in performance mode and idles at ~10W.
Unfortunately, the prices rose on these a lot, but unevenly. Beelink GTR 9 Pro is $4400, Framework Desktop is ~$3500, for what is basically the exact same mainboard as a Bosgame M5 for $2800.
Apple's M5 Max is another attractive option. Apple silicon traditionally had great MBW and was good at TG, but struggled with PP, but the new neural engines in those GPU cores have made a big difference in a good way here.
Gorgon Halo is rumored for June announcement with Q4'26 release with basically +100 MHz clocks on Strix Halo, LPDDR5X-8533 instead of LPDDR5X-8000, but more importantly, 192 GB max instead of 128 GB.
I'd say it's better to wait for Gorgon Halo than to grab Strix Halo now. However, Medusa Halo, rumored for H2'27, is slated to have 24c/48t Zen 6, 48 CU of RDNA 5 instead of 40 CU RDNA 3.5, and a 384 bit bus w/ LPDDR6, which should make 256 GB at more like ~490-600 GB/s MBW, which will really make Strix and Gorgon Halo obsolete.
Also worth keeping an eye out for Serpent Lake (intel CPU + nvidia iGPU on a single board with unified memory, rumored for 2028-2029 iirc), and on the 160 GB Crescent Island Intel dGPU.
I'm more excited for qwen3.7 9b and 72b, these are usually so good for their size
I can't bring myself to use any model that trains or sends telemetry back to my country's primary competitor/adversary. I don't care how much money is saved.
These are very good numbers. I still don’t get why they don’t compare against latest competitor versions in these posts, it’s not like we’re all not going to notice.
I think the argument is that trying to suggest that they’re close to N months from SOTA.
Realistically I assume they hope readers don’t notice the fine details.
The Qwen models are great for open weights but for every past release they haven’t performed as well as the benchmarks in my experience. They’re optimizing for benchmark numbers because they know it works.
I think its part of the expectation setting (with a side of we did our distillation/ eval harness on a specific model).
if they say it's 4.7 comparable, it anchors that into your head as the model to evaluate against.
Any reports from people using their coding agent(s)?
It is super strange that all last (3?) releases they keep comparing older models such as Opus-4.6.
Some of it’s probably timing. Some of it is wanting to look good. That said, I just went to the claw-eval site, and neither 4.7 nor 5.5 from oAI are listed on the benchmarks. So there’s also just the time from others to get benchmarking done and published.
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