alt.hn

4/5/2026 at 9:18:25 PM

Qwen-3.6-Plus is the first model to break 1T tokens processed in a day

 https://twitter.com/openrouter/status/2040239467865489874

by Alifatisk

4/5/2026 at 10:01:49 PM

Qwen 3.6 Plus is a decent model in our benchmarks (which found it to perform lower than its model card) at gertlabs.com, but not ground-breaking.

The reason for the insane popularity is because it's pretty good AND free. It's a no-brainer to switch to this for anything usage-based that isn't frontier coding while the free limits are available. It's probably running a model ~100B parameters under the hood, which won't be so heavily subsidized for long.

EDIT: our tool usage benchmark is still running, but so far, its performance with tools is dramatically better than its one shot performance. I'm treating Qwen 3.6 Plus as a near-SOTA model now.

by gertlabs

4/5/2026 at 10:27:38 PM

is it unlimited free, or the usual openrouter free (50 or 1000 requests/day)

by guteubvkk

4/5/2026 at 10:30:56 PM

You will be rate limited, so it depends on your use case. We only ran into brief, intermittent short term rate limits when making thousands of calls for the benchmark, so I imagine it's fine for personal use.

by gertlabs

4/5/2026 at 9:49:41 PM

I’m very curious if we’re going to ever get another “deepseek moment. Qwen is starting to feel like it could be one. But for it to be people would have to decide to care. It took about a month, I think mid December-mid January, from the deepseek paper for the “moment” so it doesn’t necessarily have to be right away.

by roxolotl

4/5/2026 at 9:53:46 PM

What's gone unnoticed with the Gemma 4 release is that it crowned Qwen as the small model SOTA. So for the first time a Chinese lab holds the frontier in a model category. It is a minor DeepSeek model, because western labs have to catch up with Alibaba now.

by try-working

4/5/2026 at 10:23:37 PM

on my 16 GB GPU Gemma 4 is better and faster than Qwen 3.5, both at 4-bit

so it's not so clear cut

by guteubvkk

4/6/2026 at 7:23:32 AM

depends on usage, Gemma 4 is better on visuals/html/css and language understanding (Which probably plays a role in prompting). But it's worse at code in general compared to Qwen 3.5 27B.

by tmikaeld

4/7/2026 at 5:13:27 PM

Which in the series specifically?

by acchow

4/5/2026 at 10:07:20 PM

It's unnoticed because it didn't. In Google's own benchmarks they are on par, and I've seen 3rd party benchmarks where Qwen beats G4 with high margin

by lostmsu

4/6/2026 at 12:45:03 AM

The day a western anything will need to catch up with alibaba will be a notable day indeed. Also, this will never happen.

by irishcoffee

4/5/2026 at 9:19:13 PM

https://xcancel.com/openrouter/status/2040239467865489874

by Alifatisk

4/5/2026 at 11:03:50 PM

[flagged]

by angoragoats

4/5/2026 at 11:05:14 PM

I prefer my links unrewritten

by unsupp0rted

4/6/2026 at 6:10:11 AM

Replying to you since the rage guy is flagged.

If anyone wants to avoid twitter, just set up a browser redirector that sends you to the relevant xcancel page. I haven't seen the native Ttitter interface for months now. Don't put the expectation on HN when it's so easy to fix yourself.

by Sabinus

4/5/2026 at 11:05:22 PM

If it overthinks everything the way Qwen 3.5 running locally does, then I am not surprised! :)

by neonstatic

4/5/2026 at 9:50:14 PM

Anybody want to give an anecdotal take on how good it is?

by dcre

4/5/2026 at 10:13:39 PM

sure.

git clone https://github.com/nixos/nixpkgs

ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL=https://openrouter.ai/api ANTHROPIC_AUTH_TOKEN=<make_an_account_on_openrouter_and_get_this_from_the_settings_panel> claude --model qwen/qwen3.6-plus:free

> This repository has two ways of packaging Nix packages: defining them via pkgs/top-level/all-packages.nix (the old way); or defining them via the pkgs/by-name directory (the new way). Let's port my_example_package over to the new way.

i'm not actually working in the nixpkgs repo -- i'm trying these in a private repo that has very similar structure. i'm also a n00b with these tools, so probably a bad prompt. but Qwen 3.6 actually conflates "the old way" with "the new way", attempts to do the porting in reverse, and just gets stuck. gemma-4 E4B does better. even gpt-oss-120b, an open weight model from a _year_ ago, does the full port unattended.

so either it's shit at coding, or i'm using it wrong. curious to hear other anecdotes.

by colinsane

4/6/2026 at 2:11:12 AM

How does OpenRouter manage to run closed-weight models like Qwen 3.6? Did Qwen have to actually cooperate with them by contributing the weights?

by CamperBob2

4/6/2026 at 2:34:41 AM

OpenRouter is primarily a router. It just proxies requests through to the actual provider.

by dcre

4/5/2026 at 10:26:30 PM

gpt-oss-120b is vastly better than gemma-4 E4B

by guteubvkk

4/6/2026 at 11:54:45 PM

...It's also 15 times larger.

by Sutanreyu

4/6/2026 at 6:11:39 AM

I wonder what kind of workloads people are putting through it. Presumably all tokens submitted are used to train on.

by Sabinus