The Qwen 3.6 35B A3B hype is real!!!
Summary
My personal test for small local LLM intelligence is to check whether a model has any ability to understand the code that I write for my own academic research.
Key Points
- My research is on some pretty niche topics and I doubt that anything like it is substantively present in the training sets for LLMs.
- A few months ago, small local models' ability to understand my code was nominal at best with Devstral Small 2 being the top performer .
- However, several small open weight models now have methods of accommodating fairly long contexts (gated delta net, hybrid Mamba2, sliding window attention) which makes them extremely smarter .
- I can now feed a model an entire academic paper along with accompanying code and ask it to use the paper to work out what the code is doing.
- I just spent a couple days experimenting with: Qwen 3.6 35B A3B Qwen 3.6 27B Gemma 4 26B A4B Nemotron 3 Nano All of them were able to comprehend my code significantly better than what any small local model could do a few months ago.
Notable Quotes & Details
Intended Audience
소프트웨어 개발자, AI 엔지니어