Discussion: Larger Qwen Models Perform More Poorly
teortaxesTex · x · 2026-07-20
Addressing the debate over Qwen models having "high benchmark scores but poor practical performance," a developer noted this isn't absolute but a scaling effect issue:
- Small parameters (0.5-9B): Exceptional performance ("monster" tier).
- Medium parameters (3.6-27B): Still excellent (though Gemma 4 31B is considered better).
- Extra-large parameters (e.g., 397B): Surprisingly mediocre.
The conclusion is that their training recipe fails to leverage further parameter scaling, causing large models to underperform in real-world use compared to benchmark expectations.
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