Having heavily evaluated both antirez’s ds4 flash and Qwen 3.6 27B at FP8 and Q8: it depends. The quantised Flash is better in a number of tasks despite running much slower on my DGX Spark-alike.
27B is amazing for its size but has some surprising limits when used for longer agentic coding sessions, especially if you’re using tools that are outside the stock standard web tech stuff: it really isn’t good at Relay, for example.
The thing is the data isn’t limited, and supply side constraints already solve this problem. I come from a BSc Chemistry background, and they don’t hide how organic chemistry and illegal drug synthesis are intertwined, it’s open information
But where I live the glassware and precursors will get you a very angry knock on the door.
The specific market positioning is... for me to use at my big tech company job, where we aren't allowed to use GLM and similar, but have fixed caps on how much token usage we're allowed to rack up a month.
Which basically only Nvidia does, because it’s very expensive.
Though I’m currently working on QADing the smaller Qwen 3.5 models from FP16 teacher to NVFP4 student, to hopefully eventually apply it to 3.6 27B… harder to get right than I expected though!
My GB10 Spark-alike is absolutely amazingly fun… but it is not cost effective. Step 3.7 Flash is shockingly capable (IQ4_XS and used for web dev mainly), but it cost me $6800 AUD. They’re even more expensive now. The numbers just don’t make sense: with proper triple head MTP I can get it up to ~40tk/s decode and it runs at around 1000+ tk/s prefill.
$6800 is a lot of API credits for GLM, for example, on any provider you want to use.
Now being able to run models uncensored and with privacy has value! But the cost for these is rough today.
Email me at josh (at) jgirvin (dot) com
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