I assume so - Qwen/Qwen3.8-Flash-Next is marked as the "Base Model" on the huggingface page and states it may be subject to "Qwen's separate authorization or attribution requirements"
And I assume the metrics comparing qwen are using a quantized version - from the blog they compare memory use against qwen's "standard 4-bit deployment". Which might explain the improved performance over that base model they show - it might lose less from quantization.
It's interesting. It does seem to be based on QFN, but they've modified the architecture. 10B active versus QFN's 6B, plus also QFN is 180B parameters, not 145B. But it has the same 51B n-gram table.
Also, why ship both a 145B and a 120B size? That's basically the same size class.
If you look closely there is also a 35B, tho your question still stands.
There is also a reference to a 8B
Their GitHub also references that:
https://github.com/Edge0-AI/Edge0/blob/main/licenses/edge0-m...