Qwen3-Max-Thinking - Hacker News

Posted by vinhnx 12 hours ago

413 points | 375 commentspage 2

throwaw12 12 hours ago|

Aghhh, I wished they release a model which outperforms Opus 4.5 in agentic coding in my earlier comments, seems I should wait more. But I am hopeful

wyldfire 12 hours ago||

By the time they release something that outperforms Opus 4.5, Opus 5.2 will have been released which will probably be the new state-of-the-art.

But these open weight models are tremendously valuable contributions regardless.

wqaatwt 11 hours ago||

Qwen 3 Max wasn’t originally open, or did they realease?

frankc 11 hours ago|||

One of the ways the chinese companies are keeping up is by training the models on the outputs of the American fronteir models. I'm not saying they don't innovate in other ways, but this is part of how they caught up quickly. However, it pretty much means they are always going to lag.

CuriouslyC 10 hours ago|||

Not true, for one very simple reason. AI model capabilities are spiky. Chinese models can SFT off American frontier outputs and use them for LLM-as-judge RL as you note, but if they choose to RL on top of that with a different capability than western labs, they'll be better at that thing (while being worse at the things they don't RL on).

Onavo 10 hours ago||||

Does the model collapse proof still hold water these days?

aurareturn 10 hours ago|||

They are. There is no way to lead unless China has access to as much compute power.

jyscao 8 hours ago||

They likely will lead in compute power in the medium term future, since they’re definitely the country with the highest energy generation capacity at this point. Now they just need to catch up on the hardware front, which I believe they’ve also made significant progress on over the last few years.

anonzzzies 6 hours ago||

What is the progress on that front? People here on HN are usually saying China is very far away from from progress in competitive cpu/gpu space; I cannot really find objective sources I can read; it is either from China saying it is coming or from the west saying its 10+ years behind.

WarmWash 10 hours ago|||

The Chinese just distill western SOTA models to level up their models, because they are badly compute constrained.

If you were pulling someone much weaker than you behind yourself in a race, they would be right on your heels, but also not really a threat. Unless they can figure out a more efficient way to run before you do.

esafak 9 hours ago||

But it is a threat when the performance difference is not worth the cost in the customers' eyes.

OGEnthusiast 12 hours ago|||

Check out the GLM models, they are excellent

khimaros 11 hours ago||

Minimax m2.1 rivals GLM 4.7 and fits in 128GB with 100k context at 3bit quantization.

auspiv 11 hours ago|||

There have been a couple "studies" and comparing various frontier-tier AIs that have led to the conclusion that Chinese models are somewhere around 7-9 months behind US models. Other comment says that Opus will be at 5.2 by the time Qwen matches Opus 4.5. It's accurate, and there is some data to show by how much.

lofaszvanitt 11 hours ago||

Like these benchmarks mean anything.

Alifatisk 8 hours ago||

Can't wait for the benchmark at artificial analysis. Qwen team doesn't seem to have updated the information about this new model yet https://chat.qwen.ai/settings/model. I tried getting an api key from alibabacloud, but the amount of steps from creating an account made me stop, it was too much. It should be this difficult.

Incredible work anyways!

gcr 6 hours ago||

Is there an open-source release accompanying this announcement or is this a proprietary model for the time being?

ytrt54e 10 hours ago||

I cannot even open the page; maybe I am blacklisted for asking about Tiananmen Square when their AI first hit the news?

moffkalast 10 hours ago|

Attention citizen! -10000 social credit

pmarreck 9 hours ago||

I asked it about "Chinese cultural dishonesty" (such as the 2019 wallet experiment, but wait for it...) and it probably had the most fascinating and subtle explanation of it I've ever read. It was clearly informed by Chinese-language sources (which in this case was good... references to Confucianism etc.) and I have to say that this is the first time I feel more enlightened about what some Westerners may perceive as a real problem.

I wasn't logged in so I don't have the ability to link to the conversation but I'm exporting it for my records.

jbverschoor 7 hours ago||

"As of January 2026, Apple has not released an iPhone 17 series. Apple typically announces new iPhones in September each year, so the iPhone 17 series would not be available until at least September 2025 (and we're currently in January 2026). The most recent available models would be the iPhone 16 series."

Hmmmm ok

treefry 10 hours ago||

Are they likely to take a new strategy that they no longer open source their largest and strongest models?

ilaksh 9 hours ago||

That's now new -- Qwen 3 Max for example has been closed.

gunalx 5 hours ago||

new? They have done this a long time.

pier25 10 hours ago||

Tried it and it's super slow compared to others LLMs.

I imagine the Alibaba infra is being hammered hard.

ilaksh 9 hours ago|

Well but it's also deliberately doing a ton of thinking right?

Mashimo 12 hours ago|

I tried to search, could not find anything, do they offer subscriptions? Or only pay per tokens?

esafak 9 hours ago|

I think they don't. I'd wait for the Cerebras release; they have a subscription offering called Cerebras Code for $50/month. https://www.cerebras.ai/pricing

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