Metadata
- Author: Simon Willison’s Weblog
- Full Title: Qwen3-8b
- URL: https://simonwillison.net/2025/May/2/qwen3-8b/#atom-everything
Highlights
- Having tried a few of the Qwen 3 models now my favorite is a bit of a surprise to me: I’m really enjoying Qwen3-8B. (View Highlight)
- Qwen3 is a “reasoning” model, so it starts each prompt with a
<think>block containing its chain of thought. Reading these is always really fun. (View Highlight) - I’m finding Qwen3-8B to be surprisingly capable for useful things too. It can summarize short articles. It can write simple SQL queries given a question and a schema. It can figure out what a simple web app does by reading the HTML and JavaScript. It can write Python code to meet a paragraph long spec - for that one it “reasoned” for an unreasonably long time but it did eventually get to a useful answer. (View Highlight)
- All this while consuming between 4 and 5GB of memory, depending on the length of the prompt. (View Highlight)