Rendered at 23:00:38 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Cloudflare Workers.
amunozo 12 hours ago [-]
Are these models trained from scratch or do they necessarily need distillation from bigger models to be competitive? It's usually the case that they're a small model for a family with a bigger model. In the first case, does anybody know what's the economy of training this 30B-A3B model vs. training a DeepSeek V4 Pro or Flash size of models (1.6T, 200 something B, less activated)?
namr2000 4 hours ago [-]
You don't have to train from scratch but you can. Distillation ends up being somewhere in the ballpark of 1000x faster to train [1]. It also comes with the huge advantage of not needing to create RLHF datasets, since you can just copy the behavior of the teacher model. This saves an enormous amount of labeling money at the cost of making the model behave similarly to the teacher. If you are training from scratch, you can look at LLM scaling laws to figure out roughly the compute budget you need to optimally train a model [2].
Based on [2] a 30B model needs something like 2e+23 FLOPS to train from scratch whereas a 1.6T model needs something like 1e+27 FLOPs to train. So DeepSeek v4 Pro was roughly 5000x more expensive to train than this model. I'm not totally sure how MOE affects scaling laws, so these numbers might be different in reality, but it gives you a good ballpark estimate of the difference in training scale.
Well, this is certainly not benchmaxxed, I'll give it that. And props for being honest about how far behind Qwen 3.6 MoE is this model.
But yeah, it's not the best look to have to stretch and say it's "competitive" with other models in it's weight class, when it offers not much else that's useful or novel.
matt_daemon 16 hours ago [-]
> Hardware (minimum): 1× H100 @ FP8
Cool to see this but seems like it would be pretty expensive to run
anon373839 15 hours ago [-]
This is a 30B parameter model with 3B active. It should run performantly on a Mac with > 48GB RAM at 8bit precision.
ltononro 12 hours ago [-]
Well that is like 3 USD/hour if you run it on a rented gpu
yencabulator 5 hours ago [-]
4-bit quantized 30B-A3B MoE models can run at something like 21 tokens/sec on a several year old AMD CPU.
moojacob 19 hours ago [-]
I was a fan of coheres general purpose LLM. Command A I think? Before they came out with their reasoning model.
More competition is better.
SubiculumCode 19 hours ago [-]
I always forget the VRAM requirements on these MOE things
sipjca 19 hours ago [-]
fwiw because of the relatively few activated params offloading to system RAM is quite feasible, you can see the endless amount of people doing this on r/localllama with qwen3.6 35a3b
bitwize 16 hours ago [-]
I ran Gemma4 26B A4B on an 8yo PC with a fucking GTX and it did rather well.
doodlesdev 12 hours ago [-]
Well, that's pretty impressive. Care to share your setup to do that? How much DDR3/DDR4 do you have, too?
bitwize 2 hours ago [-]
I... downloaded a 4-bit quantized GGUF of the model, used llama.cpp to run it, and pointed OpenCode at that. My machine is an 8-core Gen1 Ryzen 7, 32 GiB of DDR4, (I think) 4 GiB of VRAM on the graphics.
tonyrice 20 hours ago [-]
I'm excited to see more OSS models
20 hours ago [-]
AbuAssar 10 hours ago [-]
strange, I already submitted the same url 6 days ago:
What's strange? Yours got no comments, so another attempt seems okay. It's pretty random what gets to the front page when.
zuzululu 19 hours ago [-]
Wasn't aware that Cohere was still around but this release doesn't exactly instill confidence.
greyb 18 hours ago [-]
>Wasn't aware that Cohere was still around but this release doesn't exactly instill confidence.
It's being kept alive because the Canadian government is desperate to have a local frontier lab and is willing to inject funding and force its adoption in government services, but leadership at Cohere is known to be weak in Canadian tech circles, and they pivoting to an enterprise-first market around production RAG rather than anything close to frontier work.
I'm glad they're doing open weight releases but they're not viable in the long-run. It is embarrassing sharing similar spaces with them, but I'll try this release out in OpenCode and re-think afterwards.
daijj 6 hours ago [-]
Mulling over applying there to work. Hearing a bunch of mixed reviews where some people also complain about leadership but the day to day seems to be quite good. Any reason big US investors haven't put any money into it? (besides the fact that it's Canadian?)
zuzululu 3 hours ago [-]
why would anybody put money in Cohere when they can do it in an American AI company with larger pay off?
suddenlybananas 15 hours ago [-]
It's embarassing? Awfully harsh!
N_Lens 14 hours ago [-]
It's easy to be critical.
14 hours ago [-]
moralestapia 11 hours ago [-]
It really is. I’m very familiar with that as well.
It’s truly embarrassing how much hand-holding those guys have received from angels, investors, the government, etc. To the point where the same investors they’re going to pitch to are preparing their slides, telling them what to say during the presentation, and then approving them for even more funding afterward, lol.
That government part is corruption and illegal, by the way.
Actual usage on many of their APIs/models is painfully low, like in ... hundreds of DAUs. I don't blame them for this, but this is a "company" that should have died 2 years ago.
chartpath 9 hours ago [-]
Sure, and OpenAI, Anthropic, Grokkk are totally self-made and profitable.
osti 8 hours ago [-]
Well, the level of tech is at least on a whole different level at those companies than whatever cohere is doing.
zuzululu 6 hours ago [-]
this is just one of the many weird stuff I hear out of Canada that always surprises me, I've compiled a list:
- the wife of a professor I knew in canada apparently makes 400k/year for some Aboriginal art gallery that gets like two visits a year. They kicked out small businesses in that building so they could have a 6000 sq ft for an art gallery that sits empty with the weirdest "art" that nobody has heard of.
- canadian coworker said around 2020 there was like 3 developers that charged the Canadian government $70 million for some flutter app that had ONE screen to check in and out of places due to quarantine and it didn't even work.
- ten million here and there to raise diversity and LGBTQ in African countries that don't even have running water or electricity and other brow raising spend of tax money
- a founder raised money for a SaaS but was shut down by the Canadian government after not being issued license. Same exact SaaS was funded and the person running it had political connections.
A country with 8 times smaller population and 15 times smaller economy than USA somehow has 7 times more tax employees. It's unclear what the end game is for Canada.
dismalaf 5 hours ago [-]
> It's unclear what the end game is for Canada
The Liberals can never lose an election because the amount of people who rely on them for handouts outnumber the people who work in private enterprises and don't get handouts.
It's the Argentinian Peronist strategy...
kadoban 18 hours ago [-]
Really? Why not. From the benchmarks at least it's a pretty decent small model.
redwood 12 hours ago [-]
Aren't they focused on embeddings and strong there?
chattermate 9 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
moralestapia 21 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
rdevilla 21 hours ago [-]
[dead]
cyanydeez 3 days ago [-]
looks like it's just qwen 3.6 coder.
lumost 21 hours ago [-]
its worse at code compared to qwen 3.6 coder.
stymaar 17 hours ago [-]
How can it be worse than something that doesn't exist?
amunozo 12 hours ago [-]
Sometimes non-existing is better than existing for unnecessary or harmful things. I know that is not what you mean but I just found it relevant in the age in which making new stuff is so fast and easy due to LLMs. Main enshitification would come, imo, not from bad things but for unnecessary things that nobody asked for.
SubiculumCode 20 hours ago [-]
Do you mean it's based on qwen 3.6 coder?
daemonologist 19 hours ago [-]
There is no "coder" version of Qwen 3.6; I think they just mean it's a coding-focused model of similar size and performance (to Qwen 3.6 35B-A3B).
Regular Qwen 3.6 benchmarks slightly better and has much wider software support though, so this is probably of interest only to organizations which disallow models trained in China.
kadoban 19 hours ago [-]
I mean, Qwen 3.6 kicks ass. I don't know who these people are, but if their first outing is "not quite as good as Qwen 3.6", that's not a bad start by any means.
30B vs 35B isn't nothing either.
If it ends up just being some tweaks to someone else's weights, then meh.
mtone 18 hours ago [-]
It was trained from scratch by Cohere. They're the only Canadian AI lab - I'm glad they're releasing open weights and I wish them luck catching up!
Based on [2] a 30B model needs something like 2e+23 FLOPS to train from scratch whereas a 1.6T model needs something like 1e+27 FLOPs to train. So DeepSeek v4 Pro was roughly 5000x more expensive to train than this model. I'm not totally sure how MOE affects scaling laws, so these numbers might be different in reality, but it gives you a good ballpark estimate of the difference in training scale.
[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.12781 [2] https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.15556
But yeah, it's not the best look to have to stretch and say it's "competitive" with other models in it's weight class, when it offers not much else that's useful or novel.
Cool to see this but seems like it would be pretty expensive to run
More competition is better.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48475095
It's being kept alive because the Canadian government is desperate to have a local frontier lab and is willing to inject funding and force its adoption in government services, but leadership at Cohere is known to be weak in Canadian tech circles, and they pivoting to an enterprise-first market around production RAG rather than anything close to frontier work.
I'm glad they're doing open weight releases but they're not viable in the long-run. It is embarrassing sharing similar spaces with them, but I'll try this release out in OpenCode and re-think afterwards.
It’s truly embarrassing how much hand-holding those guys have received from angels, investors, the government, etc. To the point where the same investors they’re going to pitch to are preparing their slides, telling them what to say during the presentation, and then approving them for even more funding afterward, lol.
That government part is corruption and illegal, by the way.
Actual usage on many of their APIs/models is painfully low, like in ... hundreds of DAUs. I don't blame them for this, but this is a "company" that should have died 2 years ago.
- the wife of a professor I knew in canada apparently makes 400k/year for some Aboriginal art gallery that gets like two visits a year. They kicked out small businesses in that building so they could have a 6000 sq ft for an art gallery that sits empty with the weirdest "art" that nobody has heard of.
- canadian coworker said around 2020 there was like 3 developers that charged the Canadian government $70 million for some flutter app that had ONE screen to check in and out of places due to quarantine and it didn't even work.
- ten million here and there to raise diversity and LGBTQ in African countries that don't even have running water or electricity and other brow raising spend of tax money
- a founder raised money for a SaaS but was shut down by the Canadian government after not being issued license. Same exact SaaS was funded and the person running it had political connections.
A country with 8 times smaller population and 15 times smaller economy than USA somehow has 7 times more tax employees. It's unclear what the end game is for Canada.
The Liberals can never lose an election because the amount of people who rely on them for handouts outnumber the people who work in private enterprises and don't get handouts.
It's the Argentinian Peronist strategy...
Regular Qwen 3.6 benchmarks slightly better and has much wider software support though, so this is probably of interest only to organizations which disallow models trained in China.
30B vs 35B isn't nothing either.
If it ends up just being some tweaks to someone else's weights, then meh.