{
  "id": 1362763,
  "title": "Qwen 3.8 27B is excellent, but it defaults to wildly overthinking things",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/08/16/qwen-3-8-27b-is-excellent-but-it-defaults-to-wildly-overthinking",
  "topic": "culture",
  "section": "Culture",
  "published": "2026-08-16T22:00:39.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "Simon Willison",
    "slug": "simon-willison",
    "url": "https://simonwillison.net/2026/Aug/16/qwen-38-27b/"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "Qwen 3.8 27B, a vision-capable LLM from Alibaba's Qwen research lab, has recently been released. This 27B parameter model is excellent for running on a reasonably specced laptop, and its predecessor, Qwen 3.6 27B, was also impressive. The model's self-reported benchmarks show a significant improvement over previous versions, such as Qwen 3.6 27B and Qwen 3.7-Plus. I have been running the model on two different machines: a 128GB M5 Max MacBook Pro and an NVIDIA DGX Spark. Despite Qwen's documentation describing the model as defaulting to xhigh for reasoning effort, which is not ideal for consumer hardware, I found the results to be entertaining. The default context limit of 8,192 tokens in LM Studio proved problematic, but increasing the context length to 262,144 eliminated the issue. I tested the model's ability to draw bounding boxes around pelicans in a photograph, and it managed to produce a full interface from a single prompt, even drawing its own pelicans purely because of the label \"pelicans\" used in the example JSON. Additionally, I generated a 1000x1000 placeholder image with two blob-like \"pelican\" silhouettes placed at the given bboxes, showcasing the boxes aligning with the pelican image.",
  "summary": "Friday's big release was Qwen 3.8 27B , an Apache 2 licensed 27B parameter vision-capable LLM from Alibaba's Qwen research lab. I've been looking forward to this one: 27B is an excellent size for running a model on a reasonably specced laptop, and its predecessor Qwen 3.6 27B was impressive. Qwen's self-reported benchmarks for this model are eye-opening. They show a boost from both Qwen 3.6 27B…",
  "key_points": [],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}