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Models2026-08-09 · source-backed
An r/LocalLLaMA post (215 upvotes) ran identical inputs through Qwen 35B-A3B and Gemma 26B-A4B and found the tokenizers diverge almost entirely on code: 2.6x apart on HTML/JS, but 1,025 vs 1,039 tokens on a 55-line instruction document. Near-identical on prose. That's a near-3x difference in effective context and cost on exactly the workload where Qwen is reputed to beat Gemma, which suggests the coding-vs-language reputation gap is partly a tokenizer artifact rather than pure capability. Cheapest measurement in this newsletter: run your actual files through both tokenizers before picking a base model.
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Google DeepMind released Gemma 4 on April 2 with four model sizes (E2B, E4B, 26B MoE, 31B Dense) under Apache 2.0. Multimodal (text, vision, audio). 256K context. Native thinking and tool-calling optimized for agentic workflows. Day-zero ecosystem support across vLLM, llama.cp...
Moonshot AI dropped Kimi K2.6 today and the numbers are hard to ignore. One trillion parameters total, 32 billion active per token across 384 experts, 256K context window, and native multimodal input. It scores 58.6 on SWE-Bench Pro versus GPT-5.4's 57.7 and Claude Opus 4.6's...
Alibaba released Qwen3.6-27B on April 22. Dense architecture. Open weights. 77.2% on SWE-bench Verified, within 3.7 points of Claude Opus 4.6. On SkillsBench, it scores 48.2% versus its own 397B MoE predecessor's 30.0%. That's a 77% improvement with 14.8x fewer parameters. Let...
The models are good. The license is the real story. Google released Gemma 4 on April 2 with four variants: E2B, E4B, 26B MoE, and 31B Dense. All built on the Gemini 3 architecture. The 31B Dense variant claimed #3 on Arena AI's text leaderboard, beating models 20x its size. Th...
Hugging Face published its Summer 2026 State of Open Models report on August 14, and one statistic in it went almost entirely unremarked in the coverage. By July 2026, agents rather than humans became the Hub's primary users. Claude Code alone accounted for 44.4% of all agent...
Xiaomi released MiMo-V2.5-Pro, a 1.02 trillion parameter mixture-of-experts model (42B active) with 1M token context, fully MIT licensed. In benchmarks, it achieves 63.8% success on agentic tasks using 40-60% fewer tokens than Claude Opus 4.6 or GPT-5.4 for comparable results....
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