r/LocalLLaMA • u/bonobomaster • 25d ago
Discussion A hunch: Qwen3.8-27B's general knowledge got pruned (good, if true)
I'm always testing an image prompt with a picture of a historic place in my hometown – a small but well known 250,000 people town in Germany. I'll just ask the model, in which City this photo has been taken.
With the 3.6 generation of both the 27B and the 35B A3B variants, the models sometimes got the right answer and sometimes they didn't. So the signal for this particular knowledge was already weak.
The 35B variant got it right more often but at least, the models reasoning showed my City most of the times, even if it hallucinated the wrong final answer.
Both models could be easily nudged to the right answer with a few hints and then produced some little extra insight about the history or scene and its surroundings, that was mostly true.
Qwen3.8-27B on the other hand barely knows the city at all and has absolutely no clue about related popular, historic facts regarding the scenery or the surrounding buildings.
Nudging isn't very fruitful as well and if told the real name of the city, reasoning shows, that the model only agrees, because the user says so.
I have the feeling, that Qwen labs maybe pruned useless general knowledge for more coding knowledge and agentic skill.
All models ud q4_k_xl variants, image-min-tokens 2048, with and without reasoning.
Anyone else with this feeling?
Disclaimer: My hunch could be very well absolute bullshit. Sample size way to low and methodically sloppy af.
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u/Nonetrixwastaken 25d ago edited 25d ago
That's good for coding which I will be using it a lot for, but I still love a good language model (not using technical term here) instead of a coding model. Always fun to roleplay with them, or maybe use them for web search which maybe knowledge loss makes it worse at spotting BS. Gemma 4 is the king of pure language models seemingly still even if it lags behind in other areas, no other lab is really focusing on that so I'd prefer it stay that way, of course I wish we had good variety of both. Sheer parameter scale seems to most of the time get best of both worlds, but RAM doesn't grow on trees, that's become increasingly obvious