Simon Willison Reviews Qwen 3.8 27B Local Model

Simon Willison published a review of Qwen 3.8 27B on his blog. The Apache 2 licensed model from Alibaba’s Qwen lab is a 27B parameter vision-capable LLM. Willison called it excellent while noting it defaults to overthinking tasks. He reported more fun with this local model than any recent alternative and compared it to running Opus before added restrictions. In one experiment he configured Pi with the model to generate a script that converts its own JSONL transcripts to Markdown, then shared the resulting transcript and gist.