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Qwen 3.8 27B shows a 17GB open-weight general purpose model can have long context, effective tool calling, strong vision ability, and competent code generation (Simon Willison/Simon Willison's Weblog)

Friday's big release was Qwen 3.8 27B, an Apache 2 licensed 27B parameter vision-capable LLM from Alibaba's Qwen research lab.

  • Qwen 3.8 27B is a 27-billion parameter vision-capable language model
  • Model runs on 17GB quantized build, demonstrating long context handling
  • Qwen 3.8 27B excels in tool calling, vision, and code generation tasks

Malaysia’s sovereign AI bet: Local context becomes the next startup moat

For years, Southeast Asia’s digital economy has grown on top of technologies built elsewhere. Cloud infrastructure, operating systems, search, social media, e-commerce tools and, more recently, large language models have largely come from the US and China. The region adapted quickly, but rarely controlled the deepest layers of the stack.

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