Hacker News

Qwen3.6-35B-A3B on my laptop drew me a better pelican than Claude Opus 4.7

148 points by simonw 4 hours ago | 31 comments

Going to have to disagree on the backup test. Opus flamingo is actually on the pedals and seat with functional spokes and beak. In terms of adherence to physical reality Qwen is completely off. To me it's a little puzzling that someone would prefer the Qwen output.

I'd say the example actually does (vaguely) suggest that Qwen might be overfitting to the Pelican.

wongarsu 2 hours ago

Qwen's flamingo is artistically far more interesting. It's a one-eyed flamingo with sunglasses and a bow tie who smokes pot. Meanwhile Opus just made a boring, somewhat dorky flamingo. Even the ground and sky are more interesting in Qwen's version

But in terms of making something physically plausible, Opus certainly got a lot closer

kmacdough 52 minutes ago

Given adherence is a more significant practical barrier, it's probably the better signal. That is, if we decide too look for signal here.

wood_spirit 13 minutes ago

Such a disconnect from the minutes I’ve lost and given up on Gemini trying to get it to update a diagram in a slide today. The one shot joke stuff is great but trying to say “that is close but just make this small change” seems impossible. It’s the gap between toy and tool.

mentalgear 2 hours ago

I understand the 'fun factor' but at this point I really wonder what this pelican still proofs ? I mean, providers certainly could have adapted for it if they wanted, and if you want to test how well a model adapts to potential out of distribution contexts, it might be more worthwhile to mix different animals with different activity types (a whale on a skateboard) than always the same.

simonw 2 hours ago

That's why I did the flamingo on a unicycle.

For a delightful moment this morning I thought I might have finally caught a model provider cheating by training for the pelican, but the flamingo convinced me that wasn't the case.

akavel 48 minutes ago

r/LocalLlama is now doing a horse in a racing car:

https://redd.it/1slz38i

furyofantares 52 minutes ago

It is completely wild to me that you prefer Qwen's flamingo. I think it's really bad and Opus' is pretty good.

simonw 50 minutes ago

The Opus one doesn't even have a bowtie.

furyofantares 19 minutes ago

The Opus one looks like a flamingo, and looks like it's riding the unicycle. Sitting on the seat. Feet on the pedals.

The Qwen one looks like a 3-tailed, broken-winged, beakless (I guess? Is that offset white thing a beak? Or is it chewing on a pelican feather like it's a piece of straw?) monstrosity not sitting on the seat, with its one foot off the pedal (the other chopped off at the knee) of a malmanufactured wheel that has bonus spokes that are longer than the wheel.

But yeah, it does have a bowtie and sunglasses that you didn't ask for! Plus it says "<3 Flamingo on a Unicycle <3", which perhaps resolves all ambiguity.

prodigycorp 2 hours ago

To me the opus flamingo is waaaay better than the qwen one. qwen has the better pelican, though.

dude250711 2 hours ago

Is a flamingo on a unicycle not merely a special case of a pelican on a bicycle?

jbellis 2 hours ago

For coding, qwen 3.6 35b a3b solved 11/98 of the Power Ranking tasks (best-of-two), compared to 10/98 for the same size qwen 3.5. So it's at best very slightly improved and not at all in the class of qwen 3.5 27b dense (26 solved) let alone opus (95/98 solved, for 4.6).

__natty__ 49 minutes ago

You compare tiny modal for local inference vs propertiary, expensive frontier model. It would be more fair to compare against similar priced model or tiny frontier models like haiku, flash or gpt nano.

javawizard 38 minutes ago

Not when the article they're commenting on was doing literally exactly the same thing.

ericd 48 minutes ago

Eh it’s important perspective, lest someone start thinking they can drop $5k on a laptop and be free of Anthropic/OpenAI. Expensive lesson.

VHRanger 2 hours ago

That's not surprising; Opus & Sonnet have been regressing on many non-coding tasks since about the 4.1 release in our testing

sailingcode 15 minutes ago

I'm an iguana and need to wash my bicycle in the carwash. Shall I walk or take the bus?

layer8 4 minutes ago

You should have the pelican ride it to the carwash and wash it for you.

DANmode 12 minutes ago

That’s a long walk! You should reserve a ride with $PartnerRideshareCo.

comandillos 3 hours ago

I've been using Qwen3.5-35B-A3B for a bit via open code and oMLX on M5 Max with 128Gb of RAM and I have to say it's impressively good for a model of that size. I've seen a huge jump in the quality of the tool calls and how well it handles the agentic workflow.

iib 2 hours ago

This is about the newly release Qwen3.6. Just wanted to make sure you got that correctly.

aliljet 2 hours ago

I'm really curious about what competes with Claude Code to drive a local LLM like Qwen 3.6?

smashed 59 minutes ago

OpenCode?

JaggerFoo 11 minutes ago

FYI, using a 128GB M5 MacBook Pro, sourced from another article by the author.

lofaszvanitt 50 minutes ago

That Qwen flamingo on the unicycle is actually quite good. A work of art.

jedisct1 30 minutes ago

I'm currently testing Qwen3.6-35B-A3B with https://swival.dev for security reviews.

It's pretty good at finding bugs, but not so good at writing patches to fix them.

throwuxiytayq 19 minutes ago

I literally cannot believe that people are wasting their time doing this either as a benchmark or for fun. After every single language model release, no less.

sharkjacobs 15 minutes ago

It feels like the results stopped being interesting a little while ago but the practice has become part of simonw's brand, and it gives him something to post even when there is nothing interesting to say about another incremental improvement to a model, and so I don't imagine he'll stop.

19qUq 2 hours ago

How about switching to MechaStalin on a tricycle? It gets kind of boring.

mvanbaak 56 minutes ago

boring ... the ways all the models fail at a simple task never gets boring to me