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Muse Glimmer: 30B-parameter model optimized for always-on local agent workflows

https://research.meta.ai/blog/introducing-muse-glimmer-open-agentic-model
Will be interesting to see how Qwen3.8 27B compares against this once it releases this week. Seems like dense 30B is back in fashion?

EDIT: An open weight version of Muse Spark 1.2 is going to be released as well:

https://x.com/alexandr_wang/status/2086756152034066792

https://xcancel.com/alexandr_wang/status/2086756152034066792

Based on the benchmarks, it seems that Muse Glimmer barely edges out against Qwen3.6 27B, except for tool-calling skills (MCP, etc.). I wouldn't be surprised if they released it now because they are afraid they wouldn't beat Qwen3.8 27B.
I am glad they released it because I think we need a competitive culture of open weights that isn't just geopolitics.

But I have to say, I quite like the way Muse Glimmer thinks and talks. It's a cocky bastard in tone, but it's quite good, and its thinking traces are relatively terse.

[flagged]
I haven't really got that far in, but it writes in a sort of clipped, geeky note form in the reasoning traces without too obvious claudeisms, it seems to have been trained to have a level of wit, almost.

Like, in the car wash test, this was in the thinking traces:

“Walking won't get the car washed.”

and:

“Perhaps answer: Walk if you want to wash yourself? No”

Which made me laugh out loud.

Even in the final answer:

- - -

You have to drive it. Walking 50m won't get the car clean, it'll just get you to the car wash.

If you mean you going to the car wash to check prices / pay / get a brush, then yeah, just walk the 50m. It's about 30 seconds on foot and you save the cold-start emissions of firing up the engine for a distance you could roll.

If you mean the car itself getting washed, the car needs to be at the car wash. You can push it 50m for a workout, but driving it 50m is the practical way.

- - -

The emphasis on "you" was from the model. I mean I write like this so I can't judge its tone harshly :-)

ETA: The knowledge cutoff is January this year, so it didn't encounter car wash discourse in the scraped training set, though I suppose you can't rule out some kind of fine tuning to deal with this scenario. Still made me chuckle.

ETA 2: obviously I wrote this before you added your last paragraph. WTF dude.

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Do AI companies make release plans based on upcoming other models like this? I would think all the processes that go into the repository and weight infrastructure pre-training, checkpointing, knowledge distillation, model compression, post training pipeline, ecosystem integrations, inference API, benchmarking, human eval/safety/alignment, docs, etc... all that dictates the release schedule.
Any company working in a competitive industry is generally aware of what their competitors are doing. PR is an important aspect to market success, so it factors into release schedule. It may not be the dominant factor given engineering constraints, but yea, it’s certainly a factor, and a large one at that.
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> ...all that dictates the release schedule.

AI companies release models when they are ready - not on a set schedule. The steps are required to produce a release candidate, so a company can choose to bless the RC with the best metrics at any time - or alternatively continue (post/)training newer RCs if they feel they can do better, and they have time. When a model is ready for release is subjective, and can take into consideration what the competition is doing.

An obvious counter-example to schedules driving releases is the still unreleased Gemini 3.6 Pro.

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It will also be very interesting to see some direct head to head benchmarks between qwen 3.6 27B (let's say all at Q8 XK quantization, using the GGUF that unsloth publishes as a baseline) vs 3.8 27B. Particularly in tool use, terminal use.

The whole class of what can reasonably fit in a single GPU is an interesting category of LLM, and based on the results I've seen from 3.6 35B A3B and 27B versus what existed a year prior, it seems there's a lot of room for advancement.

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Yes, and also waiting for the next iteration of Gemma. Muse or Qwen are optimized for coding, while IMO Gemma is still better for non-coding tasks.

https://x.com/osanseviero/status/2086107547535122767

I am working on a project where we have to classify customer calls into more than 10 categories. As the client wants everything locally I tried a few local LLMs. Gemma turned out to be the best model for this task. The classification accuracy is impressive, and the client is happy that I am using an American model.
I guess the client is American.
You can partially tell by the tokeniser; which gives you some hint into the training corpus mix.

</div> is four Gemma4 tokens, but one Qwen3.6 token.

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Looks like we have a /r/localllama dweller here.
Where do you find this information for each model?
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> Will be interesting to see how Qwen3.8 27B compares against this once it releases this week

Considering that Meta distills Qwen[1] (and should!), it'd be hilarious if Muse loses the head-to-head; the "distillation attack!!1!" people claimed distillation on release n-1 is enough to match the intelligence of the latest version.

1. They wrote a paper about it

It’s really interesting timing, Qwen over thinking is what kills it for me. I’m just glad we have more options in this size class now.
I've been using Qwen3.6 35B A3B, and with reasoning turned on, I'd say 2/3 (give or take) of the tokens for a response are thinking tokens. Which at 70+ tps locally, that isn't that awful. I run an 80k context across 4-10 "agents" for my solo TTRPG, where Qwen is the GM, each NPC at a location, the director, and the narrator.

Each turn is about 45-60 seconds to generate all of the various responses. The GM and director have reasoning on, and the NPCs/Location/Narrator do not.

It's a fairly good "engine" for that. I'm not sure how a denser Qwen would do here regarding speed.

I like the tabletop RPG use case, and wanted to say: If your hardware likes it you should check out Gemma 4 for creative DMing use case. I found it to be much better at holding the plotlines and being creative on gaming turns. My experimental case was an audio-only Zork and Gemma 12B and even E4B were pretty good!
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Qwen thinking is really good in Mandarin; and probably natively trained the most there.

Try a system prompt requiring it to think in Mandarin, while still delivering the response in the user’s language.

Is the quality of the thinking better or it's just shorter since Mandarin is more compact?
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Makes me feel hopeful. Things felt more positive around the llama 3 era. Now it’s like a dark, dreadful race.
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yes i think everyone is waiting to see that ;d, i've been on qwen for the last year and a half now.
> Seems like dense 30B is back in fashion?

Huh, well... no? Gemma A4B and Qwen A3B are quite popular in fact. I'm sure 3.8 35B A3B will outperform 3.6 27B by all metrics

I'd be skeptical w.r.t. "by all metrics".

Qwen3.6 is a definitive, significant downgrade from Qwen3.5 for creative writing and prose for example. Yes, it's better at agentic and coding, but it regresses in many non-coding areas compared to Qwen3.5.

Of course, I do expect the 3.8 ones to perform better for agentic coding.

One thing I would caution is staying out of the prediction market like this.

Tech tends to get boring when you judge current products against the hypothetical capabilities of unannounced products that may never ship. It's like comparing Nikon cameras against Canon camera rumours, or comparing iPhones against unannounced and therefore largely imaginary Samsungs.

- If they do a Qwen 3.8 35B A3B (and I hope they do because I love the 3.6 version)

- and if it beats 3.6 27B by all metrics

… then the local open weights world will be a better place.

But they have said nothing about it and they dropped several weight classes for 3.6, so who is to say they won't drop the 35B? And even if they don't, this is a tall order; why would the MoE tradeoffs no longer be apparent? (Again, I really like both the Qwen and Gemma MoEs)

FWIW I am enjoying testing Muse Glimmer — it's really quite impressive on chat, has nice terse and even amusing thinking traces, a bit of brass to it, and I'm hoping it will be good on agentic stuff.

> Seems like dense 30B is back in fashion?

Surprising that Meta don't host this model, even as rate-limited free-tier.

> open weight version of Muse Spark 1.2

Wait. Is this "version" different from what Meta serves?

It seems worse than 3.6, but a bit smaller.

UPD. was wrong on smaller, it's actually much larger

I'll back up your smaller claim, but be specific that it's UD-Q4_K_XL size:

- muse glimmer: 15.9GB

- qwen 3.6 27B: 17.6GB

My video card is so close to its limit that these GB thresholds are mattering too much for me :D

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Remember when we needed 200 servers for an enterprise website because Apache used one process or thread per connection - and Nginx collapsed that into a single box overnight? That moment for LLMs is near. It’s going to move us from the big iron era of AI to small portable brains. Nature has already proved it’s possible with 20 watts and very little heat generation. And I think the data center buildout will end in carnage.
Side note! Nginx was by no means the first web server to use a non-forking mechanism, nor the first open source web server to do so. Certainly Zeus (which was closed source) was earlier and very useful in this sort of application, and so was thttpd (open source, still exists as Merecat). I used thttpd quite a bit for single box applications and at one of my employers, nginx replaced a mixed strategy with Zeus, Apache and thttpd (and we tested one other whose name I can’t recall).

Non-forking httpd servers using select() were a popular little coding challenge for a while in the 90s. Spinner was one of them.

Nginx’s real strength was being able to proxy and cache HTTP using that same mechanism, so you didn’t additionally need to deploy Varnish or some other appliance.

As to whether this is a good mental model for what is coming for local LLMs, I am not sure I am convinced. Apart from more quantisation-aware training, perhaps binary and ternary aware training, custom inference engines per model, and maybe some improvements in diffusion models, the grand challenge in small footprint LLMs is training really small reasoning and tool use models, and so far it’s far from clear they can deliver.

Truly tiny models will not be viable as general coding assistants; even 12B dense is too small and you will find plenty of people who will tell you that 26B/4B or 35B/3B MoE is too. Though perhaps they can be trained for single languages, like just Python or just TS/JS.

More likely is the idea that 30-40B dense models might be good enough for most things once low cost and likely bespoke hardware catches up.

But I don’t think any truly profound advances seem likely in software or training alone. I am no expert but it feels like we’re already a lot closer to efficiency than we were in your analogy, and the gains are perhaps not going to be much more than small increments.

Maybe we will see something like a ternary 60B/10B MoE model turn up. But at the moment at least I am not sure where the incentives are to train these.

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We've barely even started on optimizations like advanced language aware grammars, and specialization routing (dynamically loading fine tunes or seperate weights for specific tasks or languages).
Right. But those still sound like modest gain territory, or qualitative gains within the same rough performance, rather than the "breakthrough" improvement notion I was responding to.

My naïve impression is that the LLM world will keep delivering these fractional improvements for some years at the cost of simplicity. And sure, ontological support seems quite promising.

But making things radically better or faster for small models in the way that is hypothesised, that feels like it can only come as a result of hardware performance improvements and likely architecture changes.

Because there's no free lunch, right? Speculative drafting for example, noticeably improves performance until acceptance rates drop for reasons that have to do with the particular application, and then it starts hurting you, especially near the limits of the memory bandwidth. Because once it is wasteful it is an extra overhead.

I gather Gemma 4 supports, in principle, dynamic speculative draft lengths, to help with this — where it will stop making bold predictions when the success rate falls. But I'm not sure if any of the inference engines I've tested with support that.

I think small models are miraculous — I still think Gemma 4 12B is astonishing — but I guess what I am saying is that I think maybe technology is moving quickly enough that the developers are done with the low-hanging fruit.

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Everyone keeps repeating this who doesn’t understand the underlying technology.

Small llms are still way more efficiently server on big GPUs.

Sharing server capacity takes advantage of the massive parallel throughput and sharing of memory bandwidth.

You are sharing the GPUs with thousands of concurrent users.

FWIW it is entirely possible to square the notion that small models will still be hosted on cloud hardware with the idea that the data centre buildout will end in tears.

Many analysts (and Microsoft) think even now that if everything committed gets built there will be considerable oversupply and there is not the revenue to pay for it.

If small models do continue to improve in unusual ways (I think there are limits) then the marginal need for cloud AI compute could fall precipitously beyond current estimates. The marginal need for consumer AI could almost totally collapse if someone makes good progress on very small reasoning and tool-calling models (which is a modestly big if)

The possibility of the data centre boom resembling the Chinese real estate bubble is not inconsiderable.

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The power of small models isn't only that you can run them on local hardware. You can also fully own your data and workflow, and choose/fine-tune models for your specific use-case.

for clarity, I'm not agreeing with GP that small models will mean doom for data center projects

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I don’t remember that and I was there! The idea that the performance delta between Apache and nginx for any normal workload is anything like 20,000% is absurd.
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What specific technical signals make you think we're close to a shift like that?
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It'll need a change in architecture for that to happen. For example Geometric Reasoning that's being actively worked on by people like this:

https://www.sophontic.ai

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What does this have to do with Muse Glimmer 30B?
First point is plausable, moving from bigger models to smaller models. But the nature thing is a bit of an overstatement, yes our brains are very efficient but they are fundamentally different from LLMs so it doesn't really map.
Nature takes its own sweet time to come up with photosynthesis or the krebs cycle. What takes 2 billion years for Nature to work out, these large systems will soon do it in 2. They have capacity to compress time in ways the chimp troupe cant.
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Can these models compete with Cerebras inference performance? Why would I pay for a 2400 baud modem when DSL is available?
brains do it with 20 watts because theyre analog. llms require massive amounts of power and this isnt changing any time soon without a breakthrough
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And a breakthrough in hardware, specifically.
There are exciting developments underway in analog computing.
https://xcancel.com/finkd/status/2086755195535413696

"... Soon we'll also release the weights for Muse Spark 1.2, our latest foundation model..."

This is bigger news - good for self hosting enthusiasts and a strategically sound move for Meta. Any push towards 'anti Chinese' models will directly benefit Meta as the competition on the frontier open-weights American models is almost non-existent. Meta will have no problem being #1.

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It wouldn’t surprise me if Meta does become the #1 American open weights provider, but I doubt it’ll be easy. Thinking Machines has a good amount of talent behind them as I understand it and their Inkling model was decent (admittedly not great though). I think Meta’s biggest problem is going to be internal as there’s be a bunch of headlines posted here on their talent retention issues.
Poolside Laguna was quite good too (if you look beyond some of the teething issues).

Had Deepseek V4 Flash 0731 not launched, their latest Laguna release was really intelligent at non-coding tasks and it would have been my go-to model for my local workloads.

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What about Inkling? It's a quite large model that for some reason isn't discussed much.
Meta is rocking AI. As of last week I have been using their excellent muse coding harness with their model Muse Spark 1.2.

Starting this morning I am running their new local 30B model muse-glimmer on my old MacMini 32G using Ollama (remember to increase the context size!) and pi coding harness. I am getting good results with muse-glimmer running locally, with the caveat that everything runs slowly (e.g., give it a task and then go walk outside or do Qi Gong exercises for a while).

Friends Don't Let Friends Use Ollama https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47788385
When that article was first published , I started looking into llama.cpp. With the help of an LLM I researched the knobs to turn that made most sense.

Things went from "local models are useless unless you have a 512GB GPU I guess" to "oh.. I can do a lot of stuff locally now!"

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{"deleted":true,"id":49247706,"parent":49244699,"time":1786386534,"type":"comment"}
seems to underperform on Terminal Bench compared with qwen3.6-27b: 51.7 vs 60.7
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Newb question but I’m curious what would help it to run faster? Would it need more vRAM or just system memory?
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Unsloth has quantized versions uploaded: https://huggingface.co/unsloth/Muse-Glimmer-30B-GGUF

The quantized releases often change in the weeks following release as new improvements are discovered, so either use a tool that checks HuggingFace for new versions or manually check back in a few days or weeks to check for improved versions.

Initial reports are good. It hasn't been out long enough for anyone to really test thoroughly, but the people I know who have stable non-public test cases are reporting impressive results compared to even Qwen3.6 27B. That's a good sign that this might not be benchmaxxed (trained to excel at public benchmarks with less impressive performance on general tasks) which has been becoming common with recent releases.

www.reddit.com/r/localllama is a good place to keep up with the details from people who are actually using it. It feels strange to recommend a subreddit over Hacker News, but on this topic the /r/localllama threads are much more on topic right now if you're looking for information about the model.

There are some initial reports that even the 2-bit quantization is looking somewhat usable. That might make it small enough to squeeze into 16GB GPUs. I'd take those reports with a grain of salt because early tests are often optimistic and I've yet to see good results from anything 3-bit or less, but it should be fun to experiment with.

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Some interesting findings from the chat template designs:

1. The template name is Onyx ATEM as found in the tool call exception message

2. It appears to be following a harmony-style chat template. But the tool use seems to be a xml like :<atem:function_calls> / <atem:invoke> / <atem:parameter>

3. atem: a internal joke of meta in reverse?

https://huggingface.co/meta-models/Muse-Glimmer-30B/blob/mai...

The XML tags are similar to <antml:xxx>, which is obviously Anthropic ML (or ANTrophic xML).

I think it’s likely 3; meta in reverse. While tokenisers and preprocessing can catch it, you want your special tokens to be unique and not present in the original corpus. <meta: is likely too common.

Likely inverted "meta" to avoid collision with HTMLs meta tags
> atem

also perhaps taking some small joy from the lexical similarity to aten[0] namespace that lies at the heart of pytorch

[0]: https://github.com/pytorch/pytorch/blob/main/aten/src/README...

atem also means breath in German
With the business model for API based LLMs looking iffy at best it seems like we’re heading back to the “server under your desk” era of IT again.
Considering how all the big players are playing fast [1] and loose [2] with limits, billing [3] and adding undisclosed changes that burn your tokens on autopilot [4], it can't happen soon enough.

[1]: Limits may change without notice, including due to capacity constraints. - https://support.google.com/gemini/answer/16275805?sjid=14713....

[2]: "standard limits" are never defined - https://support.google.com/gemini/answer/16275805?sjid=14713...

[3]: https://tobyonfitnesstech.com/blog/anthropic-refund-scam/

[4]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48947776

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> at best it seems like we’re heading back to the “server under your desk” era of IT again

Maybe in the very long term. If companies go local, the efficient model is to buy some big hardware to share among developers.

I run local models. Even with 128GB unified memory systems or a 5090 or RTX 6000, the generation speeds X model quality X context length is still far behind what I get from my SOTA model subscriptions. I also pay a lot more for the locally generated tokens in electricity and hardware costs. I'm also limited in parallel requests to the local box. The list goes on.

I really like running local models, but for any given point in time it's more efficient to have a big central box aggregating requests and churning through them. So maybe companies buy $300K servers and try to split it among 30 users instead of trying to buy 30 x $10K boxes.

More likely, they rent time on cloud servers by the month so they can adapt the hardware when new models come out with new requirements.

Then some day in the distant future when hardware is cheap and plentiful again, it might make sense for us to go back to individual boxes under the desk.

Why do you say API based llms looking iffy at best? Do you just mean current profitability due to market pressures from some companies’ subsidized investor money?

Surely, even if you’re just using open weights models, it should theoretically be cheaper to use them in a highly optimized cloud architecture(even with vendor markups) rather than each person serving their own models from much less efficient (and more importantly, much less consistent volume) self-owned “server under your desk”?

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I've been coding using the LLM server in my living room for the past few weeks, and I haven't had this much fun with tech for ages
Can I ask, do you feel the pain of the level of abstraction? I haven't tried local in a few months, but last time I tried, I felt like I was directing a coding exercise - whereas with a frontier model, it feels more like directing a product building. "I need this feature", vs "write code to do this in this file".
> write code to do this in this file

I haven't had to micromanage to this level. I usually start with a spec for a feature, which will be as detailed as I am opinionated about the feature. But it's usually on the level of a high-level context, plus some key implementation details (technology choices, key requirements, maybe an interface/API specification to 80% detail), and then the project already has high-level policies documented about e.g. how to structure files within the project.

Then I do a planning phase, task breakdown, and implementation of subtasks all within the model. I do read through it, but mostly the quality is good and I might make a couple notes. Then I do a review phase, which usually picks up a couple things. I'm moving towards less manual review of results and more automation as I learn what I can and can't trust the model with.

There's definitely a capability gap vs. larger models, but honestly I kind of prefer this workflow, as I stay more in touch with how the codebase is structured.

And it's great to be able to experiment as much as I want without worrying about how many tokens I'm burning or how close I am to a usage limit.

Thanks for that, it's the level I like to work too - what model/quant are you using? How much vram/context and which coder?
I'm using Qwen3.6 27B Q4, max context with pi on 32GB VRAM (although I'm testing out Glimmer on a feature implementation literally right now). Pi is great because it has minimal context added by the agent.

Looking forward to the 3.8 27B release to compare.

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That’s part of it. There’s also just a natural back-and-forth between what I call “time sharing” and “personal.” When the thing you want is expensive, you share it remotely, but as soon as costs fall, everyone wants it under their desk.
What do you mean iffy? The major AI labs are gross profitable when selling access to inference. In addition, the best models have trillions of parameters and are most efficiently served on large, expensive clusters and served to many concurrent users.
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more likely that hosting and delivering the models will be commoditized, much like how DO, Linode, Hertzer etc all commoditized VPSs and server hosting. And you'll end up paying for virtual hardware size (or compute resources) rather than tokens
This release is not a meaningful improvement in any metric over 5 months old Qwen 3.6.

DS v4 Flash update maybe, but it is too big for typical Joe's desktop.

I wouldn't say "server under your desk", necessarily; more of an "Linux getting big" era of IT.

If you want to host the model on the server under your desk, you can. If you want to build a data center on-prem to host it, you can. If you want to pay a cloud provider to host it at their data center until you figure out how to scale it without their help, you can. It's like when people were first building commercial services to support Linux-based OSes, and people were also still hacking on it on local machines.

APIs may still have their place - maybe you just want to throw your devs a known quantity with all of the management built in - but it's not going to make Sam Altman a trillionaire, which is something anyone outside of the SV echo chamber could have figured out as soon as the first real competition to OpenAI emerged.

With how expensive consumer hardware is and will continue getting (due to LLM demand), good luck getting a "server under your desk" for something less than an arm, leg, and first born.

Until A100 prices are reliably under 1.70$ an hour, there is no GPU/AI bubble and Michael Burry doesn't know anything about GPUs.

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The gguf is up and works, I don’t know if it’s them or unsloth that’s facilitated this but it’s nice because e.g. Inkling still doesn’t appear to have support in llama.cpp which makes it irrelevant to a class of user.

Unfortunately I don’t have enough experience with Qwen 27B to immediately compare, but I do it’s Qwen 3.6 35B A3. It’s much slower obviously but it seems to be way more efficient with its thinking to the point that using it might actually be faster. I find Qwen and some others rehash the same things over and over when thinking without getting anywhere, in mg limited checks here Muse is much better.

I don't really use the Qwen 3.6 27B though I do test the variants (Bonsai, ThinkingCap).

I really like the 3.6 35B A3B for experiments, and it seems OK, but as you say, it spins round in thinking loops more than say the 26B Gemma 4 does. If Muse doesn't actually-wait itself as much it will be very interesting.

I am just downloading it to run my small tests.

I have a custom A3B proxy that caps its thinking off. It is a known issue with the model that Qwen themselves documented but is almost never addressed in any harnesses. I also patched up a few other known bugs in the proxy. I highly recommend you shim A3B and when it hits 2K thinking tokens inject (paraphrasing) 'Time to wrap it up bud! Get to work' into its thinking stream. It almost always gets to work. If it needs more time to think there is always next turn.

In my experience it is almost never productively thinking past that point, just spinning in circles. I also reinject all of the thinking. And there are a few tells that it is getting stuck. I have an optional mode that takes the last few turns and tool calls and shoots it off to DSV4 with a prompt to basically understand where it is at and inject better thinking and or planning. It almost always gets it over relatively difficult humps, but some of the time I don't want things going remote. It might end up with 10-30 cents of DSV4 calls over a hours and the quality improvement is remarkable.

The other thing is I trick it into thinking a web_search tool is a web search but it really just asks DSV4 the prompt. DSV4 is a cheap filter to help prevent prompt injection lol. You can give it other models but DSV4 is my cheap-mode default.

edit: oh! My final 35B A3B tip -- use an extremely simple harness. Pi is good. Pi's default tools almost exactly match what Qwen says they tested the model with (likely meaning that tool set is also what they trained it with or something similar). So, in my experience bigger harnesses don't have a noticeable improve ment on tasks.

Fascinating, thank you. I am trying to switch to pi from opencode (my own thinking loops and burnout are a challenge lately).

It had not occurred to me that you could nudge it to stop thinking with a proxy. Nice idea.

Will favourite your comment and come back to it.

ETA: Incidentally you've helped me put into words the difference between the way Muse Glimmer thinks to the way Qwen thinks. There is a clear sense of urgency in Glimmer's thinking traces.

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the “Actually… But wait!” style responses are so annoying, even Claude opus struggles with this so I’d be interested if meta has done something to cut down on that while still giving good responses
It's not perfect but it is very terse! Better than BottleCap managed to do with post-training Qwen in ThinkingCap.

I suspect it will help a lot with enabling preserve-reasoning, because the biggest apparent limitation of this model is the 128K context window.

Though the practical issue I am seeing on my M1 Max MBP is that performance suddenly drops off a cliff if I have DFlash enabled.

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> Muse Glimmer is a 30-billion-parameter model optimized for always-on local agent workflows. It’s small enough to run on a Mac or PC with a single consumer GPU, enabling use cases that range from local agents and function calling, to local coding, and LLM-as-a-judge evaluation.

The next iteration in LLM products is a 24/7 thinking loop where the claude-code like thing gets input continuously from your wearable, notifications, and newsfeeds and is constantly preparing things for you.

This is is already possible with Claude Code. I use a setup where I have one instance monitoring a local queue, I have a web app for receiving webhooks from various sources and pushing them to the queue. Plus email for things that don't have webhooks. That instance then decides what to do with each input, sometimes it can spawn additional agent to investigate/prepare, sometimes it creates a ticket assigned to me and then waits for me input. All of that just uses the monitoring tools built into CC. The dispatcher loop doesn't need to be extremely smart, so I might experiment replacing it with a local model like this.
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Maybe it's my lack of imagination, but what do you imagine you'd be doing where you'd want to keep a computer busy overnight?

It seems like the purpose of humans isn't to keep machines busy. When our phone or laptop is idle, it's fine if it sleeps. And when we do want something, we'd rather not wait.

(Also, this new model seems to be designed to keep latency down, which is useful for interactive tasks.)

Help convince Firefox of this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46294238 Rather than develop its own AI, Firefox should develop a system to pipe your html rendered browsing history in real time so external local services can process it: https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/archive-your-browser-hi.... Firefox could be the only browser that does this.
It is interesting but it does look like a careful distillation of (Spark and) biggers open-weight models.

The progress compared to Qwen3.6 27B is good, not that impressive, it's a 4 months old model. (kuto to them to compare to 27B dense and not 35B MoE, it's more fair to do so). It is very probable that Qwen3.8 27B will crush Glimmer-30B on most benchmarks.

Still great if they want to play in this space. Having competition for the 24-32GB VRAM target is only good for the end user.
Agreed, the trend in this consumer-accessible range is encouraging.
I'm so excited about these two new models. Qwen 3.6 27B has been my sweet spot so I cannot wait to try 3.8. Glimmer looks really strong, I'm encouraged that Meta compared it to 3.6 in the model card! Exciting times!
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What I think would be perfect is a model that could run on a single DGX spark and be competitive with DSV4 Flash 731. Flash is already a game changer. Hopefully meta plans on this, like the old 70b. V4 flash is smart enough for any use but slightly too big. 27b-30b isn’t intelligent enough.
DSV4 Flash 0731 already runs on RTX 4090 24GB + 128GB system RAM at a usable tok/s and quantization.
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This model I think will be too slow for that on Spark, even at 4 bit quant.

It's a dense model, not MoE like e.g. Qwen 35b or Gemma 4 26B A4B. On a Spark it will be memory bandwidth limited

I haven't tried yet (working on it) but back of the napkin estimate puts it at around 15tok/s even after converting to NVFP4. Prefill would be much higher though. That 15tok/sec is pretty typical for dense models of this size:

NVFP4 Q/K/V/O and MLP projections: ~13 GB/token

BF16 attention gates: ~3 GB/token

BF16 LM head: ~2.5 GB/token

Total: ~18.9 GB/token

At 273 GB/s, that gives a bandwidth-only ceiling of about 14.5 tok/s; actual performance would be lower.

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Still needs 32-64GB memory to run it locally. 64GB Macbook pro with an M5 chip costs more than 4k Euros in Germany. A more practical model would be a language specific (e.g Python or JVM language) and excellent at tool calling and reasoning. Maybe that way they can shrink it even more.
Practically ~20GB with KV cache

> We quantize weights to ~4-bit, bringing the LM under 20 GB. We validated minimal to no degradation on agentic tasks under compression.

https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1vkgsum/introdu...

I think if there's going to be advantages to making smaller, more targeted models, those advantages will probably come from targeting specific domains, not from targeting specific languages.

I think that if an LLM can't abstract over the differences between Python and C++, it probably will have an even harder time abstracting over the differences between writing code that manages a webserver, and writing code that does aerodynamic simulations.

I am running it on a single RTX 3090 (24GB VRAM).

Some folks on Reddit are having the same experience: https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1vkm42m/muse_gl...

It uses an order of magnitude less VRAM at longer contexts which is a huge advantage over Qwen 3.6 27B

Coming from the PC games industry in the 90s and early 2000s, it was a struggle to run some of the games on release. 90%* of people wouldn't be able to play the AAA games on release (think Crysis, etc). This period of local LLMs reminds me of that time, whereby the hardware just isn't there yet. Give it time, and the prices will drop.

* total guess

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I'm sooo happy I pulled the trigger on upgrading and getting a new laptop (with 64 GB RAM) last summer. Feels like it was just in time before the exponential price jumps.
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There have been discussions on language specific not really being a relevant change to reduce size.
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Well if you're spending thousands on API tokens already, you could just drop the same amount on a 128GB MacBook Pro and that's a one time cost.
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I feel like we’ve had this discussion before. From what I remember, specialized models rarely do that much better than general ones, hence no mode Codex models.
There is no good reason to believe language-specific models are going to be any meaningfully smaller, just worse. Same as English-only models vs those trained on a multilingual corpus.
> 64GB Macbook pro with an M5 chip costs more than 4k Euros in Germany

Sure, if you want the latest and almost* greatest. You can pick up an M1 Max 64GB for ~1k.

* I guess 128GB also exists

The machines that can run this are pricey, but not beyond a high end developer machine.
4K bucks buys you around 180 months of <insert AI subscription here> with zero upfront cost.
Problem is that might go away or get nerfed.
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If that happens you can still buy hardware later with almost certainly more (tok/s)/$ and better capabilities to run newer models more efficiently (remember native MXFP4?). Right now basically every generation of accelerator is adding new capabilities. These aren't yearly DirectX 9.0c-compatible GPU performance bumps.

As an individual, for average privacy needs (e.g. open source or at-home coding and automation), it's pretty much complete nonsense financially to self-host LLMs currently or select hardware now based on the capability to do so, and pay thousands of bucks extra.

If you don't mind exfiltrating all your IP to the API provider
Haha wow. I’m trying to even imagine the AI landscape in 15 years and I can’t.
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Even if you had a 64GB machine: Are you willing to reserve 90% of your memory to run a LLM? With dirt cheap models like deepseek-v4-flash that will run "forever" on $10, the answer for me is clearly: no.
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I don't understand the desire to run own AI models for programming locally. No laptop is ever going to be as powerful and energy efficient to run anything close to OpenAI, Anthropic or Google models. A model you can run on a loptop is simply not going to work as well as it's needed for programming. Small models for linguistic work fine, but anything more sophisticated simply won't provide enough resources or power. Or models would need to be significantly dumbed down - then why use them at all? So far the idea of carrying a "thin" or "thin"-like device looks more reasonable to me, while running AI on your own server.
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I lament the comments saying this in any way redeems Meta (the company).

The researchers releasing this stuff have almost nothing to do with Meta other than being bankrolled by the slaughterhouse.

You aren't the customer, you are the pawn in big tech's game of thrones. Your good will is a commodity to be traded, almost literally. It will be used against you the moment it's convenient. This is open weights because Meta couldn't monetize it in any other way than to cloud developer's judgement of their reputation.

But I guess most people just don't care.

I'm glad it's open. It does not make me think any better of Meta.

It’s rather amusing to me to read comments like this, and then simultaneously whenever a Chinese company or team releases open-weight models or whatever there is a giant round of applause, America is so behind, and there’s nothing but positive things to say about the intelligent, creative, and well-intentioned Chinese engineers (which is true, America certainly doesn’t have a monopoly on great people). Don’t you know? Only China can release good, open weight models and American companies can’t compete. Oh by the way all the spend is for nothing because China alone can release open-weight models thus destroying American AI.

When an American company does anything? Doom. And. Gloom. The engineers? Taken to the slaughterhouse! America? Behind! The public? Bamboozeled!

> This is open weights because Meta couldn't monetize it in any other way than to cloud developer's judgement of their reputation.

I’ve been told over and over this doesn’t matter. Just needs to be cheap and open. Or maybe that’s only when Chyna is involved?

Sorry this post is a bit snarky but it really is something to behold. And certainly I don’t know the OP’s opinions on Chinese open weight models. Perhaps they agree with me.

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It makes me wonder why this dynamic exists here, and I do wonder at times how much our conversations here are influenced by China in a top-down fashion. I'd prefer to think that HN is pretty organic, but that is probably a naive thought.
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Apparently Americans haven’t got the memo yet that the world is moving closer to China.
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> Only China can release good, open weight models and American companies can’t compete. Oh by the way all the spend is for nothing because China alone can release open-weight models thus destroying American AI.

Let me be blunt and let me say: you don't understand why we people support Chinese models.

1. Chinese labs started with open weight models, US labs started with dooms day narrative

2. US VC based companies must become greedy to win and return the money, Chinese companies can make 1/10 of that revenue and still be happy

3. Meta in this case, started nicely with Llama, then switched to closed models, kicked out researchers to build data labeler CEO empire inside Meta. Now opening again, what's next? closing again?

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There is a big astroturfing going on social media platforms by the chinese. Did you notice 'day in a life of unmarried 30 yr old lady in china' videos flooding usa social media.

Regular ppl in the west now hold mildly positive views of the ccp and how 'advanced' china is than usa.

Then there are europeans who now are looking for china to give them the technology handout now that relationship with usa has soured.

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I'd also argue this is the case for any company releasing open weights. They're not righteous, they're marketing. That's not necessarily a bad thing! They're releasing some great stuff for free and we benefit from that. Every company doing this has a motivation to not release these for free.

Alibaba, Google, Moonshot, Thinking Machines, etc are not releasing their models for free because they love to. They want to grab market share. I'll take it.

I still will not use a hosted Meta product, but damn this model looks solid.

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This model doesn’t look solid at all. It comes months after the Qwen model, and in almost half the benchmarks, it performs worse than that. Plus, the next Qwen 3.8 is going to be announced this week. So, this model is DOA.
I don't really care that much about benchmarks, but having tested it on one of my puzzle prompts I can tell you that it solves it well, writes clearly, isn't noticeably slower than Qwen 3.6 27B and is much more terse in its reasoning (which will help with preserve-reasoning).

It also has a knowledge cutoff inside this year.

The main limitation is the smaller maximum recommended context.

Meta can never be redeemed, but it's still valid to admit that FB at one point had a very badass engineering culture.

They're one of 2 companies I would absolutely never work for (weapons etc aside). FB's recruiters hounded me so often I requested that they blackball me. The day they became Meta, I learned this by checking my email to see that they started trying to reach out again. I once again requested that they blackball me. This by extention taints OAI, the other company I'll never work for.

After a few hours with Glimmer I'm pretty impressed. It's better than the benchmark scores seem to indicate compared to Qwen 3.6 27B. I'm very excited for 3.8

> FB at one point had a very badass engineering culture

Perpetually kneecapped by one of the worst management cultures I've ever seen

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> It's better than the benchmark scores seem to indicate compared to Qwen 3.6 27B. I'm very excited for 3.8

Is it worth considering if it's only marginally better than Qwen 3.6 though? Qwen 3.8 27B is almost there, and will probably be better suited as drop-in replacement for 3.6. Not even considering there's probably going to be a 3.8-35B-A3B too - which will have even better performance.

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Mind telling me roughly what you had on your resume that had meta /fb hounding you for a job? ( Of course so I can avoid having this situation happen to me, naturally)
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Muse Glimmer doesn't redeem Meta, but it's a contribution to the commons and the Apache 2.0 licensing is an improvement from the restricted licenses attached to Llama. If even Meta can use a permissive license for its model weights, so can any other company.
How is this non-sequitor the top comment?
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Heaven forbid people have a moral compass and communicate it
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There is literally not a single comment like this, the only off topic comment like this is yours.
Your lamentations and opinions are noted. Do you have anything to say about the model? Something useful or substantive? Or is this just a place for you to let us all know what you are thinking these days?
You’re conflating the release of a local dense model that can benefit the ecosystem with the adverse effects of a digital ad system.
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To be honest the main issue with meta has never been around open/closed software. They've also done react, Cassandra and some other bits. But this, like their open weights is like a feather pressing down on the scale compared to things like promoting genocide in Myanmar, enabling Cambridge analytica, creating a huge closed ecosystem which dominate(s/d) local community communication, mandating doxxed communication, trying to replace actual community communication with algorithmic nonsense etc.
Crazy idea, maybe people can be happy a new open model got released, and still have nuanced ideas on meta as a whole.

A company is a big thing there's a lot of moving pieces, why do we have to evaluate it as a whole instead of just seeing it as it is?

  > being bankrolled by the slaughterhouse.
Thanks, that was a very loud LOL.
If it’s open, do you care so much that it’s from Meta? At least it should be able to give you an honest answer about Tiananmen Square.
You can say the same about planet Earth.
More meta derangement syndrome on HN, what a surprise.

We all benefit when companies invest their resources in producing open models. No one thinks this absolves anyone of being terrible elsewhere. But we can still be happy about it.

This is Apache 2.0, which is quite permissive. Just accept the gift.

These kind of responses are hilarious.

Someone gives something for free (and indeed this is entirely free) and the top comment is pure complaint.

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Any retort to do this like “but why would they just openly release this”[1] pretty much answers itself. Public relations.

If a company can spend money to redeem itself then, well, it can (game theoretically or whatever) do whatever it wants in the future and then spend money to wipe the slate clean.

[1] By which I mean: the very act of being prompted to ask such a question, of planting a seed like hmm, Meta might have some aspects which are good for us. You don’t have to be convinced of it. Just the seed itself can pay for itself.

Meta and its products, as a whole, is a threat to your kids, your mental health, your community's health and the planet as a whole. It is just sad and very repulsive everyone fell so easily addicted to their social drug. Yes - it is a drug, and it is hard to get off from.

Nothing redeems them at this point of time, they are doing exactly ZERO to redeem. Tossing open weight models (not opensource!!) is not a basis for redemption, and does not constitute remorse in any way. Trying to portray it as such is complicity to META's crimes against humanity.

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what makes Meta so bad ???? they just your average billion dollar company
I can't take any Big Tech company that still uses PHP seriously. Sorry.
Pelican, rendered by Muse Glimmer on my Mac running LM Studio (with this model release: https://lmstudio.ai/models/muse-glimmer): https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer#url=ht...

It has all of the components of a pelican riding a bicycle, though not exactly arranged in the right order!

(For comparison, here are the pelicans I got from Muse Spark 1, 1.1, and 1.2: https://bsky.app/profile/simonwillison.net/post/3mseqv5z4qk2... )

> It has all of the components of a pelican riding a bicycle, though not exactly arranged in the right order!

Maybe a sign that they didn't have SVG pelicans in the dataset

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Picasso's Pelican
Happy to see meta back in the game, it's like after llama nothing came out that was comparable to mainstream open models.
Great to see Meta back, looks like really strong, local model, can't wait for llama.cpp support.
some support already merged, and I verified in a local build that it runs (cannot get MTP params working tho, about ~40 tok/s on my beefy 800GB/s 7900XT w/ 20GB VRAM). https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/pull/26841
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The post suggests that you need an rtx 5090 use it, which is currently selling for around $5,000 USD. I wouldn't exactly call that "my device", since my device costs about 25% of that for the entire computer.

For the same cost, you could run on a frontier model on a pro plan for two years. The economics dont make a lot of sense for this to me, so I would love some input on why people want to do this instead (privacy, for fun, etc).

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If you’re doing breakeven math on subscriptions, consider that your own rig can run 24/7 whereas you will get a fraction of that with sub rate limits. Even if you factor in PG&E residential rates, the breakeven is a lot closer to months for overnight long-running agentic coding a couple times a week.

And in terms of interesting use cases: recently pointed an agent at Blender and gave it vision. That setup can essentially iterate on a scene forever.

It seems exceedingly unlikely that the current Pro plan costs will hold for the next two years. The subsidization train is going to end eventually.
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The post does not imply the 5090 is needed, that is just a common reference point.

A single six year old RTX 3090 works great: https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1vkm42m/muse_gl...

I fully expect Meta will release other, smaller Muse models in the near future too.

The 5090 is also supposed to be a $2000 GPU, not a $5000 one. The entire market is utterly distorted right now, which will impact cloud inference more and more over time too. They are not immune to the absurdly high RAM prices, so their prices will have to go up over time too until the RAM supply chain goes back to normal.

I'm currently running it on an RTX 3090 (street price ~$1000 USD) with a long context and getting pretty good performance.

Prefill: ~1000 tok/s

Decode: 75-100 tok/s

It'll be far faster on a 5090, but I find the above performance to be acceptable. I've seen some claims that it even works OK on an AMD RX 7900XT (~$500USD)

The performance will be so-so, but you can buy an Intel Arc B70 for $1000. There are definitely ways to get going for less.
Optimizing speed is really the way to go. Yet 24GB is not what everyone can afford. Maybe we could take some of those 56tk/s and transfer into some free RAM space using MoE loading ? I'd be glad with a less than 10GB and more than 6tk/s model.
Unfortunately this is just the entry price for LLMs. With the exception of the Qwen 27B models, I personally haven’t found a ton of use cases for models less than 200B. With the right setup, fine tuning, etc, you can make small models do cool things, but hard to please everyone given the insane hardware costs at the moment and the comparably cheap API costs.
Small models are still great for lots of “simple intelligence” use cases, like annotating or summarising files and media; or even just basic chat when given web search tools.

My local NAS is private and I’m not going to send it off to APIs for captioning or metadata; but even Qwen3VL 8B does an excellent job at this, despite being quite old.

They are also really excellent for fine tuning. Unsloth and Tinker (from Mira’s TML) are great places to start.

If your use case is narrower than “coding agent for everything”, you can probably match frontier performances on that narrow domain with ~30b and exceed it with ~100b+.

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I don't thinnk just MoE will solve it. If you hit constantly different expert layers, you can't outsource layers efficently and have to swap it in.

MoE will be faster because it will read less memory for sure, you still have to have it though.

The comparison set is Gemma4-31B and Qwen3.6-27B, not the current Qwen

Fair on size, but the headline numbers are against a model a generation back

That is the most recent Qwen and Google models, there is no newer version, yet. Qwen3.8 27B might come in a couple of days tho, if it's launched alongside the large one when the Qwen3.8 countdown reaches zero.
What more recent open weight Qwen release is there?
Having played around with this model a bit, I am fairly confident that it is not competing in the coding space.

It can do that, but its actual selling point appears to be a different take on guardrails and safety alignment.

Either that or the only new training data left was industrial quantities of dark romance literature and Wattpad.

Clever business move. 131k context is more than enough for that use case, and due to that small K/V footprint, you can probably have a bunch of characters on the same GPU.

Or it's just a happy little accident. We will never know.

___

I was informed that normal people use LLMs for mundane tasks like asking for a pancake recipie.

That it apparently can also do decently.

Unfortunately, it is also very confident, regardless of whether it is actually correct.

So maybe it should actually stay the smut engine and nothing else.

good to see new open weights releases from meta
good looking showing too, which is excellent.
The least they could do, after ruthlessly bombarding my employer's servers with requests, ignoring the robots.txt, scraping everything, and incurring significant Google Maps costs for us in the process.
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Meta seems like the one American bigtech that would distill the the other American frontier models. My enemy’s enemy is my friend?
> Some have tried to frame distillation as harmful, but I think it is important to protect the principle that you can learn from anything you can observe.

- Mark Zuckerberg

https://www.meta.com/thefutureisforeveryone

You think the company buying up all the books, cutting off the bindings, and feeding them through a scanner isn't also distilling other models?
They do distill, their own bigger Muse model.
I tried to run it with lemonade by installing it via hf but did not succeed, it gets some weird 500 errors. I also see that ollama has currently only an mlx version available.

Anybody here succeed to run this on AMD?

Let’s give thanks to all those meta engineers who have been ripped for my heir teams (while sitting right by them) working on manually tagging data. I guess the morale dip paid off in some way? I wish you all well and hope you find some happiness … IYKYK
Looking forward to giving this a try with llama.cpp. I’m watching the open-weights competition with high expectations.
Wow, Meta is back (at least for now)!

I like this class of model. Multi-token prediction makes it viable to run dense models at not-too-far-off speeds as MoE models with much better intelligence.

The submission’s title (open weights 30B local coding model) is luckily wrong: This is meant to be a general agentic model.

It even comes pre-quantized and with a MTP/drafter model. Looking good!

Let’s hope they aren’t dishonest with the benchmarks this time …

> The submission’s title (open weights 30B local coding model) is luckily wrong: This is meant to be a general agentic model.

https://xcancel.com/alexandr_wang/status/2086756152034066792

It's correct. See the OpenCode demo. Generic models are good enough for coding without necessarily being designed specifically for coding.

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> It even comes pre-quantized and with a MTP/drafter model

Glad to see the extra engineering effort that went into creating this local model and making it run well on a consumer device. I use qwen3.5-coder, and am waiting to kick the tires on this one. I hate to say this, but kudos to Meta ! I hope apple and others follow suit and create similar local models for other use cases like audio, images and video that can run on a laptop.

I'd really like to see a 45B-ish dense model ready for a dual GPU setup. Something with a little more intelligence while still within the range of some higher end local setups.
There is definitely an under-served target memory size of 48GB - almost everything aims for: 12, 16, 24, 32, 64, ...) But most dual-gpu setups, 3090/4090 (and some mac configs afaik) have 48GB, and most 64GB systems would do well with the extra 16gb of overhead saved. 48GB is also moderately common in PC memory configurations since 24gb DIMMs are a thing.
Meta released their own 4-bit quant of this model for devices with 24GB VRAM.

That's a modern gaming laptop; cheapest I see in the US with 24GB is $3.5k.

Should be quite a bit faster than the new M5 MacBook Pro, and you can run Linux on it!

Another candidate for the 7900XT (20GB VRAM) I got sitting around. I pulled latest llama.cpp (targeting vulkan during build) after seeing a muse PR merged a few hours ago, and unsloth/Muse-Glimmer-30B-GGUF:UD-Q4_K_XL runs on my 7900XT barely (and with no MTP). Sits at 19GB VRAM w/ 4 parallel 113k context slots, all layers on GPU, and at 700 tok/s prompt, and ~36 tok/s generation.

Waiting on Q3 to download to check speed + do my usual anecdotes. I generate beefy code snippets and poems, and also ingest my HOA declaration and answer nuanced questions.

edit: i should've prefaced this somewhere with: This card ballparks at 800GB/s IO, which I can't seem to find easily on the market anymore. Kinda the ideal card for this model, if I just had a _little_ more VRAM (XTX is 24GB).

edit2: not mtp, this is dflash model (param in child comment). I'm up to ~60 tok/s generation and sitting at 19GB VRAM (i added --no-mmproj (makes it text-only i believe) because I'm used to speculative decoding wanting more VRAM and I'm already close to the limit :sweat_smile:)

Q3 results: unsloth/Muse-Glimmer-30B-GGUF:UD-Q3_K_XL gets down to 15.6GB VRAM and full context (131k) on the 4 parallel slots. Prompt/generation speeds about the same. Overall feeling like a nicer-fitting Qwen 3.6 27B, but want to test out MTP generation speeds once I can.

edit: My favorite bit of reasoning I saw go by in my "generate me a beautiful code snippet" anecdote: 'Could give a snippet of beautiful code: the "hello world" in brainfuck? No.'

edit2: my first dflash speculative model! no mtp. I'm up to ~60 tok/s on empty context with `--spec-type draft-dflash`

Meta did not abandon opensource. I would love to see a smaller distill, or a moe of this size but the benchmarks seems competetive as long as it isnt benchmaxed witch i would not be suprosed if it is.
> Meta did not abandon opensource

Open weights*

I don't think outside of the Big 3 (Ant, OAI, GDM), given the strong competition from China, any other Lab has a chance at capturing the coding market if they aren't open weights (save for xAI whose latest Grok looks every bit good & will probably rely on Cursor for distribution instead of going open weights). There's literally no other selling point, as the capabilities have mostly converged by now among the chasing pack.

Don’t sleep on NVIDIA and Nemotron.

It’s not completely open source, but they actually release their pretraining and post-training datasets with some redactions for (cough) pirated content.

They also have very good code and playbooks for actually doing a fine-tune, CPT, etc.

Even if you’re not tuning a Nemotron model, its mixes are very excellent for your replay data slice; or general experiments. Way better curation and quality than Dolma, etc; or other large huggingface data mixes I tested.

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Many companies are stressed about token cost, as we are moving to a consumption based charge. In the meantime - new open source models, such as DeepSeek V4 Flash and GLM5.2 reduced the price to about 13x chepaer. Also OpenAI had reduced its price for considerably. Now Meta is back in this game. The upcoming months are going to be interesting (GoT)...
The favourable comparisons to Gemma 4 and qwen3.6 look promising!
Those two offer MoE variants, this doesn't seem to.

Dense model makes it dog slow on anything without HBM. Max 15tok/sec on decode on DDR5 systems like a Spark or a Strix Halo -- and that's at 4 bit quant.

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The benchmark comparison is against the dense variants not MoE
Sorry I dont know if this is the right place but... 2000AD The Glimmer Rats , was the best drawn comic strip story by far in that publication.
That's a bit amusing - not that I have the hardware to run it, but officially it's not available in Hong Kong. Not that getting it would be much of a problem with a help of a VPN either, but I'll assume mainland China is also restricted. Certainly not a competition for Chinese open weight models... in China.
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The combo that makes agents reliable: progressive tool routing, persistent memory, and multi-model failover.
Where is the pelican??
I'm listening to pelican sounds on youtube while I wait for Simon.
In my experience it's faster (10tk/s vs 35tk/s) and better than qwen3.6 series.
kind of a nonspecific complaint, but i haven’t yet had much luck with anything under ~120b, feels like models released on that order is coming to a trickle. the last few qwen models didn’t seem to go that high, and i got worse results than qwen3.5-122b
Next step: Burn the weights of these local models into an asic that ships cheap on a laptop (AMD/taalas looking at you), and I will be a happy camper. Make it pluggable so I can select a model I want. I use qwen3.5-coder currently on my laptop, and while it works well enough for me, it is somewhat slow processing tokens.

I would hazard a guess that fast small models with a smart agent harness can do quite well compared to large models which cant be run locally.

Just asking, what is the recommended models for M3 MacBook with 18G memory? Seems modern local models are not available.
You can try this site, toggle your computer specs at the top for a refined list of models and tokens/sec.

https://www.canirun.ai

Personally I would never trust a coding agent or agent harness from Meta.

I agree with their open-source model approach, but actually trusting Meta… to protect my privacy and my data… when it’s running on my personal hardware…

Not . In . A . Million . Years - that ship has sailed

I wish they would release the quantized versions in a safetensor format. Many frameworks can't load PTE and GGUF.
Having just bought a 5070 Ti (16GB) instead of a 5090 (24GB), I am sad.
Why did you decide for the 5070 Ti? You will always suffer compared to the 5090?
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Throw in 5060ti. By the way 5090 is 32 GiB.
Meta knows how to win back developer's hearts .... let's see if they have the goods
If there is anything meta can do to regain hearts other than owning up their evil deeds, radically change their business model and paying up for taxes and damages, then the world is truly fucked and corporations will continue to win.
even 30B model is too large to large on local device (low end). meta should provide free hosted model api to use it.
Meanwhile those of us with 128GB RAM plus some VRAM don't have any good modern (last 8 months) open weights models to make use of all that. I don't care if it would run 5 tok/s, I want a smarter model than Qwen3.6 which avoids loops and can handle more context than 80k before crashing.
Refreshingly practical
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How are you handling the tradeoff between quantization for device fit and accuracy loss on tool calling? That's where local agents typically break down in production.
Meta's clearly changing strategies back towards their original "frontier open source", but this time around they have a lot more competition from leading Chinese labs.

I'm all for it though, and I think Glimmer is a fantastic bet on locally-hostable models. I for one would love to self-host as much as I can.

Clear, useful, done
Can I run this on my RTX 5090?
Yes they have quants for 32GB and 20GB use-cases (including mmproj and kv cache + context)
How many data using in Polish Language?
will it run on 2x 5060Ti with 16GB each?
It should - the kquant-dynamic variant is targeted towards 32GB. Downloading it now to give it a try.
It does, beautifully. Now let's wait for an NVFP4 GGUF!
yes. you can even parallelize two cards and get 1.7 times the speed.
Qwen 3.6 27B is still such a beast!
Random question: Would you be able to run this model on a Macbook Air M5 (latest)?
It it has less than 64gb then probably not
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LOL the mogging of GDM is hilarious.

I don't know why MSL released this, but it is very nice that they did.

The more open weight models get released the greater the market for personal and small business oriented hardware to run these models. This will drive lower cost hardware, which has stagnated in recent years due to most software not needing the performance and capacity.
Higher demand for 5090's did not make them cheaper, because Nvidia got much higher margin products to focus on.
The opposite happening because foundries are full to capacity making higher margin stuff.
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From twitter Alexandr Wang

> 3/ muse glimmer was developed with its own architecture and recipe, optimized for its size and agentic performance requirements.

This means we're in the endgame does it not? If the architecture was NOT optimized for intelligence ...

and now the recent Meta model 'security issue' begins to make sense
what I can tell is that Meta is just starting and it is so underrated.
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I haven't really got that far in, but it writes in a sort of clipped, geeky note form in the reasoning traces without too obvious claudeisms, it seems to have been trained to have a level of wit, almost.

Like, in the car wash test, this was in the thinking traces:

“Walking won't get the car washed.”

and:

“Perhaps answer: Walk if you want to wash yourself? No”

Which made me laugh out loud.

Even in the final answer:

- - -

You have to drive it. Walking 50m won't get the car clean, it'll just get you to the car wash.

If you mean you going to the car wash to check prices / pay / get a brush, then yeah, just walk the 50m. It's about 30 seconds on foot and you save the cold-start emissions of firing up the engine for a distance you could roll.

If you mean the car itself getting washed, the car needs to be at the car wash. You can push it 50m for a workout, but driving it 50m is the practical way.

- - -

The emphasis on "you" was from the model. I mean I write like this so I can't judge its tone harshly :-)

ETA: The knowledge cutoff is January this year, so it didn't encounter car wash discourse in the scraped training set, though I suppose you can't rule out some kind of fine tuning to deal with this scenario. Still made me chuckle.

ETA 2: obviously I wrote this before you added your last paragraph. WTF dude.

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"Meta Muse" immediately made me think of Metamucil.

Product teams really need to hire at least one or two people with a 12-year-old's sense is humor. They need to winnow all the potential stupid jokes out of their product namings.

Quietly the best thing in the thread
PSA: Fast RAM isn't going to be getting cheaper anytime soon. Acquiring inference hardware is a really good way to own an appreciating hard asset. Learning how to use it and cool it is a hacker's journey worth taking. My 4090 I bought in late 2022 for $1600 is selling for a cool $3,489.95 right now, and going strong under nominal use. My DRR5 has tripled in value, my nvmes almost doubled. I grabbed a 128GB M5 Max MacBook Pro when they were still available and told all my friends to buy at least one. With that and a base M4 Studio 36GB, HuggingFace rates that hardware as:

> Amazing! You have a total of 128.94 TFLOPS of computing power. 71.3% percentile on scale of "GPU Poor" to "GPU Rich"

The way I see it, these are amazing machines that the richest folks are hovering up. I think they should be in the hands of regular people as much as possible. They depend on an incredibly global, increasingly fragile supply chain. If the become impossible to produce, their value would increase tremendously. I think they will become really valuable to you to use the tokens directly, but if that isn't the case, they can be rented out or resold. Please don't just buy any hold. Let's try to get as many people that can use them for decent things that help humans. For example:

https://spectrum.ieee.org/small-language-models-ai-pharmaceu...

As an industry, I wish we would stop calling these things "open weight" because it is too easy to confuse with actual "open source", which they are not.

Photoshop source code+ OSI license = open source

Photoshop binary you can run on your own computer = open weight

Photoshop SaaS web app = closed, proprietary (Opus, GPT, etc.)

"Open weight" models are still just binary blobs that are completely inscrutable. It's like bringing home a dog from the rescue and just hoping that it doesn't have a tendency to bite kids in the face. You just can't know. The only thing that you can do is try to add more training (fine tuning) telling it not to bite kids.

I don't think the FOSS community has ever accepted this, but somehow we're feeling like it is okay now.

Photoshop source code+ OSI license = open source

Photoshop binary you can run on your own computer = open weight

I don't think this is a correct analogy. You are not allowed to distribute modified versions of the Photoshop binary. Most open weight model licenses allow you to make and distribute your own finetunes, etc.

I believe that comparing LLMs with traditional deterministic software is fundamentally misleading. It is extremely difficult to truly interpret what LLMs do internally, and as of now, nobody fully understands it. Even if you trained the LLM yourself, there is no source code you can simply read and learn from.

Sure, having information about how these models were trained is helpful for reproducibility, but it is basically impossible for anyone without substantial capital and access to the same (likely copyrighted) data to reproduce the model. For normal users, owning the model weights essentially means owning 100% of the model, you can inspect and study the weights in much the same way as the lab that produced the model can, you can modify the weights, and you can use and distribute them if the license allows you to

Given an open weights model trained to sometimes bite kids, we can’t train it to not bite kids, even though billions of dollars of research have been thrown at this open problem.

Given an open weights model trained to never bite kids, you can get it to bite kids with 10 prompts and a linear projection, the known simple algorithm doesn’t even need a backwards pass.

yay asymmetry!

Any pointers to more info about that? Sounds interesting.
It is useful to indicate you can run the weights on your own hardware. That’s categorically different from most other commercial offerings. It’s as if your adobe example ignores the reality that would exist had photoshop been invented in 2019: cloud only.
This analogy is terrible and seems to be extremely misinformed about how rescues evaluate dogs before they are put up for adoption
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