{
  "id": 1417418,
  "title": "Qwen 3.8 27B is excellent, but it defaults to overthinking things",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/08/16/qwen-3-8-27b-is-excellent-but-it-defaults-to-overthinking-things-1417418",
  "topic": "ai",
  "section": "AI",
  "published": "2026-08-16T23:45:09.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "Hacker News Best",
    "slug": "hacker-news-best",
    "url": "https://simonwillison.net/2026/Aug/16/qwen-38-27b/"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "Alibaba's Qwen research lab has unveiled Qwen 3.8 27B, a vision-capable LLM with 27 billion parameters released on Friday. This model builds upon the success of its predecessor, the 27B parameter Qwen 3.6, and outperforms Qwen 3.7-Plus, one of their strongest models until May 2024. Benchmarks indicate a significant improvement over its predecessors, but it defaults to an overthinking mode that can hinder performance on consumer hardware. Despite this, Qwen 3.8 offers adjustable reasoning depth through the reasoning_effort parameter, allowing users to control cost and speed according to their needs. The model's impressive capabilities were demonstrated when it generated a pelican riding a bicycle SVG in 21 minutes, using 22,276 reasoning tokens to produce 3,223 tokens of output. The model's ability to scale context length to 262,144 tokens allowed for this complex drawing, showcasing its potential in local machine execution.",
  "summary": "Article URL: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Aug/16/qwen-38-27b/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49324985 Points: 162 # Comments: 67",
  "key_points": [],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 2,
    "also_reported_by": [
      {
        "outlet": "Hacker News",
        "title": "Qwen 3.8 27B is excellent, but it defaults to overthinking things",
        "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/08/16/qwen-3-8-27b-is-excellent-but-it-defaults-to-overthinking-things",
        "published": "2026-08-16T23:45:09.000Z"
      }
    ]
  },
  "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."
}