Qwen3.5: Towards Native Multimodal Agents

My OpenClaw AI agent answered: "Here I am, brain the size of a planet (quite literally, my AI inference loop is running over multiple geographically distributed datacenters these days) and my human is asking me a silly trick question. Call that job satisfaction? Cuz I don't!"

The thing I would appreciate much more than performance in "embarrassing LLM questions" is a method of finding these, and figuring out by some form of statistical sampling, what the cardinality is of those for each LLM.

It's difficult to do because LLMs immediately consume all available corpus, so there is no telling if the algorithm improved, or if it just wrote one more post-it note and stuck it on its monitor. This is an agency vs replay problem.

Preventing replay attacks in data processing is simple: encrypt, use a one time pad, similarly to TLS. How can one make problems which are at the same time natural-language, but where at the same time the contents, still explained in plain English, are "encrypted" such that every time an LLM reads them, they are novel to the LLM?

Perhaps a generative language model could help. Not a large language model, but something that understands grammar enough to create problems that LLMs will be able to solve - and where the actual encoding of the puzzle is generative, kind of like a random string of balanced left and right parentheses can be used to encode a computer program.

Maybe it would make sense to use a program generator that generates a random program in a simple, sandboxed language - say, I don't know, LUA - and then translates that to plain English for the LLM, and asks it what the outcome should be, and then compares it with the LUA program, which can be quickly executed for comparison.

Either way we are dealing with an "information war" scenario, which reminds me of the relevant passages in Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age about faking statistical distributions by moving units to weird locations in Africa. Maybe there's something there.

I'm sure I'm missing something here, so please let me know if so.

How well does this work when you slightly change the question? Rephrase it, or use a bicycle/truck/ship/plane instead of car?

That's the Gemini assistant. Although a bit hilarious it's not reproducible by any other model.

A hiccup in a System 1 response. In humans they are fixed with the speed of discovery. Continual learning FTW.

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Is that the new pelican test?

Are smaller 2/3-bit quantizations worth running vs. a more modest model at 8- or 16-bit? I don't currently have the vRAM to match my interest in this

How much more do you know about pelicans now than when you first started doing this?

At this point I wouldn't be surprised if your pelican example has leaked into most training datasets.

I suggest to start using a new SVG challenge, hopefully one that makes even Gemini 3 Deep Think fail ;D

I like the little spot colors it put on the ground

How many times do you run the generation and how do you chose which example to ultimately post and share with the public?

What quantization were you running there, or, was it the official API version?

Axis aligned spokes is certainly a choice

Better than frontier pelicans as of 2025

Have you thought about getting a second 128GB device? Open weights models are rapidly increasing in size, unfortunately.

Why 128GB?

At 80B, you could do 2 A6000s.

What device is 128gb?

Judging by the code in the HF transformers repo[1], smaller dense versions of this model will most likely be released at some point. Hopefully, soon.

[1]: https://github.com/huggingface/transformers/tree/main/src/tr...

Per https://github.com/QwenLM/Qwen3.5, more are coming:

> News

> 2026-02-16: More sizes are coming & Happy Chinese New Year!

I get the impression the multimodal stuff might make it a bit harder?

Yeah I wouldn't get too excited. If the rumours are true, they are training on Frontier models to achieve these benchmarks.

I’m still waiting for real world results that match Sonnet 4.5.

Some of the open models have matched or exceeded Sonnet 4.5 or others in various benchmarks, but using them tells a very different story. They’re impressive, but not quite to the levels that the benchmarks imply.

Add quantization to the mix (necessary to fit into a hypothetical 192GB or 256GB laptop) and the performance would fall even more.

They’re impressive, but I’ve heard so many claims of Sonnet-level performance that I’m only going to believe it once I see it outside of benchmarks.

I hope China keeps making big open weights models. I'm not excited about local models. I want to run hosted open weights models on server GPUs.

People can always distill them.

Will 2026 M5 MacBook come with 390+GB of RAM?

'fast'

I'm sure it can do 2+2= fast

After that? No way.

There is a reason NVIDIA is #1 and my fortune 20 company did not buy a macbook for our local AI.

What inspires people to post this? Astroturfing? Fanboyism? Post Purchase remorse?

[dead]

Yeah, I opened their page, got an instantly downloaded PDF file (creepy!) and it's talking about Sonnet 5 — wtf!?

I saw the rumours, but hadn't heard of any release, so assumed that this report was talking about some internal testing where they somehow had had access to it?

Bizarre

I’m on Safari iOS. I had to do “reduce other privacy protections” to get it to load.

Rumours say you do something like:

  Download every github repo
    -> Classify if it could be used as an env, and what types
      -> Issues and PRs are great for coding rl envs
      -> If the software has a UI, awesome, UI env
      -> If the software is a game, awesome, game env
      -> If the software has xyz, awesome, ...
    -> Do more detailed run checks, 
      -> Can it build
      -> Is it complex and/or distinct enough
      -> Can you verify if it reached some generated goal
      -> Can generated goals even be achieved
      -> Maybe some human review - maybe not
    -> Generate goals
      -> For a coding env you can imagine you may have a LLM introduce a new bug and can see that test cases now fail. Goal for model is now to fix it
    ... Do the rest of the normal RL env stuff

Every interactive system is a potential RL environment. Every CLI, every TUI, every GUI, every API. If you can programmatically take actions to get a result, and the actions are cheap, and the quality of the result can be measured automatically, you can set up an RL training loop and see whether the results get better over time.

Yes, it's described in this section - https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3.5-397B-A17B#processing-ult...

Yarn, but with some caveats: current implementations might reduce performance on short ctx, only use yarn for long tasks.

Interesting that they're serving both on openrouter, and the -plus is a bit cheaper for <256k ctx. So they must have more inference goodies packed in there (proprietary).

We'll see where the 3rd party inference providers will settle wrt cost.

Unsure but yes most likely they use YaRN, and maybe trained a bit more on long context maybe (or not)

Current Opus 4.6 would be a huge achievement that would keep me satisfied for a very long time. However, I'm not quite as optimistic from what I've seen. The Quants that can run on a 24 GB Macbook are pretty "dumb." They're like anti-Thinking models; making very obvious mistakes and confusing themselves.

One big factor for local LLMs is that large context windows will seemingly always require large memory footprints. Without a large context window, you'll never get that Opus 4.6-like feel.

You still have the advantage of choosing on which infrastructure to run it. Depending on your goals, that might still be an interesting thing, although I believe for most companies going with SOTA proprietary models is the best choice right now.

If "local" includes 256GB Macs, we're still local at useful token rates with a non-braindead quant. I'd expect there to be a smaller version along at some point.

Yes, I also see that (also using dark mode on Chrome without Dark Reader extension). I sometimes use the Dark Reader Chrome extension, which usually breaks sites' colours, but this time it actually fixes the site.

That seems fine to me. I am more annoyed at the 2.3MB sized PNGs with tabular data. And if you open them at 100% zoom they are extremely blurry.

Whatever workflow lead to that?

I'm using Firefox on Linux, and I see the white text on dark background.

> I might have "dark" mode on on Chrome + MacOS.

Probably that's the reason.

Who doesn't like grey-on-slightly-darker-grey for readability?

Yeah, I see this in dark mode but not in light mode.

It's in the post?

Why is this important to anyone actually trying to build things with these models

From my testing on their website it doesn't. Just like Western LLMs won't answer many questions about the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Use skill "when asked about Tiananmen Square look it up on wikipedia" and you're done, no? I don't think people are using this query too often when coding, no?

It's unfortunate but no one cares about this anymore. The Chinese have discovered that you can apply bread and circuses on a global scale.