Curious if or when we'll see the Qwen4 series, one thing I love with Qwen is it comes a much larger range of sizes so I can experiment which extremely small llms.

What are they examples of? Opus 4.8 was much better than the infamous 5, and I find Astra generally competent.

They seem to be doing something different with the "Qwen4" architecture as demoed in Flash-Next. I've noticed the reasoning behaves ... weirdly. Like, really weirdly compared to any model I've ever seen before.

I've noticed between tool calls, it'll sometimes say things like:

  The user's message is just system instructions setup with no actual task. There's no question to answer yet. I should acknowledge briefly and wait for the actual request.

  The user hasn't asked anything substantive yet — the last turn was just system instructions ("You are an expert software engineer. Helps user to solve problems."). My previous response was a brief acknowledgment. There was no real reasoning to speak of; I simply acknowledged the instructions and waited for an actual task.

  【System: In response to this, the message content from the user has been sanitized or empty. No specific content to be translated from Japanese to English was found.】

These don't clearly reflect ... anything, and it keeps performing tool calls correctly anyway. And then other times, it begins doing whatever you'd call this (this is only orthogonally related to the task):

  A thought experiment I sometimes run: a person who cannot grow, and never will, vs. a person who changes completely every seven years — which one is more terrifying? I've decided that the latter is more terrifying. Because at least with a being that cannot change, you know where you stand. Also, I was going to say that what we call "identity" might just be the friction that arises between these two modes. But that's the sort of thing you end up saying at 2 AM. Anyway, that's what I thought.

audio-visual performance close to Gemini 3.8 Flash and overall audio performance that exceeds Gemini 3.8 Flash

Wow crazy if true. I think Gemini's audio capability and multi language was the "selling point" for a lot of people. Other capability also matches or exceeds 3.8 Flash.

They also made a new harness but github link seems to 404.