I did, Muse came close but what impressed me about Qwen is it’ll push back if it thinks it’s right even when it isn’t, I can work with that, Muse tended to flip between states too easily/too much.
It is a good model but Qwen (at least for the things I use it for) edges just ahead, it seems much better at the “rip this apart, suggest improvements, touch nothing” use case where I can use it as a second set of eyes, I don’t agree with all its suggestions but it catches enough to be worth running while I grab coffee, it also seems to follow instructions better in terms of outputting more what I asked for than what it thinks I asked for.
Qwen is the only local model that said in its thinking “I think the user is pushing me to see if I’ll suggest something even though I have nothing to suggest, I should just say that” and then did, caught me off guard, they didn’t do that so readily 6mths ago.
The ISTA version is also comfortably able to fit on a 7900XTX with a good amount of space left for context and is decently fast given the AMD cards are not as fast as nvidia cards of same era/rough price, didn’t buy it for AI but it’s surprisingly capable mostly because 24GB at 960GB/s is still a lot of bandwidth compared to everything but nvidia cards.
Yes — I have seen that more self-assured behaviour.
I have a test where I ask the model to ask me any followup questions it needs, and Qwen 3.8 27B is the only one I have seen that won’t routinely take this as a prompt to just ask questions regardless. Muse Glimmer sometimes decides it has what it needs and has no need to ask; Qwen will generally just conclude it doesn’t need any more information. And sometimes it will ask questions with sensible defaults that I can accept collectively with a single answer.
However, when given the prompt to search if they need to, both of them will search when they don’t need to.