Qwen-3.6-Plus is the first model to break 1T tokens processed in a day

gertlabs 13 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Qwen 3.6 Plus is a decent model in our benchmarks (which found it to perform lower than its model card) at gertlabs.com, but not ground-breaking.

The reason for the insane popularity is because it's pretty good AND free. It's a no-brainer to switch to this for anything usage-based that isn't frontier coding while the free limits are available. It's probably running a model ~100B parameters under the hood, which won't be so heavily subsidized for long.

EDIT: our tool usage benchmark is still running, but so far, its performance with tools is dramatically better than its one shot performance. I'm treating Qwen 3.6 Plus as a near-SOTA model now.

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guteubvkk 13 hours ago | parent [-]

is it unlimited free, or the usual openrouter free (50 or 1000 requests/day)

	▲	gertlabs 13 hours ago \| parent [-]
		You will be rate limited, so it depends on your use case. We only ran into brief, intermittent short term rate limits when making thousands of calls for the benchmark, so I imagine it's fine for personal use.

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Alifatisk 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

https://xcancel.com/openrouter/status/2040239467865489874

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angoragoats 12 hours ago | parent [-]

[flagged]

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unsupp0rted 12 hours ago | parent [-]

I prefer my links unrewritten

	▲	Sabinus 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Replying to you since the rage guy is flagged. If anyone wants to avoid twitter, just set up a browser redirector that sends you to the relevant xcancel page. I haven't seen the native Ttitter interface for months now. Don't put the expectation on HN when it's so easy to fix yourself.

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roxolotl 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I’m very curious if we’re going to ever get another “deepseek moment. Qwen is starting to feel like it could be one. But for it to be people would have to decide to care. It took about a month, I think mid December-mid January, from the deepseek paper for the “moment” so it doesn’t necessarily have to be right away.

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try-working 13 hours ago | parent [-]

What's gone unnoticed with the Gemma 4 release is that it crowned Qwen as the small model SOTA. So for the first time a Chinese lab holds the frontier in a model category. It is a minor DeepSeek model, because western labs have to catch up with Alibaba now.

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guteubvkk 13 hours ago | parent | next [-]

on my 16 GB GPU Gemma 4 is better and faster than Qwen 3.5, both at 4-bit

so it's not so clear cut

	▲	tmikaeld 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		depends on usage, Gemma 4 is better on visuals/html/css and language understanding (Which probably plays a role in prompting). But it's worse at code in general compared to Qwen 3.5 27B.

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lostmsu 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's unnoticed because it didn't. In Google's own benchmarks they are on par, and I've seen 3rd party benchmarks where Qwen beats G4 with high margin

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irishcoffee 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The day a western anything will need to catch up with alibaba will be a notable day indeed. Also, this will never happen.

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Sabinus 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I wonder what kind of workloads people are putting through it. Presumably all tokens submitted are used to train on.

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neonstatic 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If it overthinks everything the way Qwen 3.5 running locally does, then I am not surprised! :)

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dcre 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Anybody want to give an anecdotal take on how good it is?

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colinsane 13 hours ago | parent [-]

sure.

git clone https://github.com/nixos/nixpkgs

ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL=https://openrouter.ai/api ANTHROPIC_AUTH_TOKEN=<make_an_account_on_openrouter_and_get_this_from_the_settings_panel> claude --model qwen/qwen3.6-plus:free

> This repository has two ways of packaging Nix packages: defining them via pkgs/top-level/all-packages.nix (the old way); or defining them via the pkgs/by-name directory (the new way). Let's port my_example_package over to the new way.

i'm not actually working in the nixpkgs repo -- i'm trying these in a private repo that has very similar structure. i'm also a n00b with these tools, so probably a bad prompt. but Qwen 3.6 actually conflates "the old way" with "the new way", attempts to do the porting in reverse, and just gets stuck. gemma-4 E4B does better. even gpt-oss-120b, an open weight model from a _year_ ago, does the full port unattended.

so either it's shit at coding, or i'm using it wrong. curious to hear other anecdotes.

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guteubvkk 13 hours ago | parent | next [-]

gpt-oss-120b is vastly better than gemma-4 E4B

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CamperBob2 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

How does OpenRouter manage to run closed-weight models like Qwen 3.6? Did Qwen have to actually cooperate with them by contributing the weights?

	▲	dcre 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		OpenRouter is primarily a router. It just proxies requests through to the actual provider.