Simon Willison reviews Qwen 3.8 27B, a new open-weight vision-capable LLM from Alibaba that shows strong benchmark improvements over its predecessor. He notes the model's default reasoning effort setting of xhigh causes excessive overthinking on mundane tasks, quickly exhausting context windows and making it impractical without adjustment.
Background
Qwen 3.8 27B is an Apache 2 licensed 27B parameter vision-capable LLM from Alibaba's Qwen research lab, released in August 2026 as a successor to Qwen 3.6 27B.
- Source
- Simon Willison
- Published
- Aug 17, 2026 at 06:00 AM
- Score
- 6.0 / 10