fwiw because of the relatively few activated params offloading to system RAM is quite feasible, you can see the endless amount of people doing this on r/localllama with qwen3.6 35a3b
>Wasn't aware that Cohere was still around but this release doesn't exactly instill confidence.
It's being kept alive because the Canadian government is desperate to have a local frontier lab and is willing to inject funding and force its adoption in government services, but leadership at Cohere is known to be weak in Canadian tech circles, and they pivoting to an enterprise-first market around production RAG rather than anything close to frontier work.
I'm glad they're doing open weight releases but they're not viable in the long-run. It is embarrassing sharing similar spaces with them, but I'll try this release out in OpenCode and re-think afterwards.
There is no "coder" version of Qwen 3.6; I think they just mean it's a coding-focused model of similar size and performance (to Qwen 3.6 35B-A3B).
Regular Qwen 3.6 benchmarks slightly better and has much wider software support though, so this is probably of interest only to organizations which disallow models trained in China.
I mean, Qwen 3.6 kicks ass. I don't know who these people are, but if their first outing is "not quite as good as Qwen 3.6", that's not a bad start by any means.
30B vs 35B isn't nothing either.
If it ends up just being some tweaks to someone else's weights, then meh.
More competition is better.
It's being kept alive because the Canadian government is desperate to have a local frontier lab and is willing to inject funding and force its adoption in government services, but leadership at Cohere is known to be weak in Canadian tech circles, and they pivoting to an enterprise-first market around production RAG rather than anything close to frontier work.
I'm glad they're doing open weight releases but they're not viable in the long-run. It is embarrassing sharing similar spaces with them, but I'll try this release out in OpenCode and re-think afterwards.
Regular Qwen 3.6 benchmarks slightly better and has much wider software support though, so this is probably of interest only to organizations which disallow models trained in China.
30B vs 35B isn't nothing either.
If it ends up just being some tweaks to someone else's weights, then meh.