A free model that fits on one graphics card scores 52 — then spends 22,276 thinking tokens drawing a picture
Alibaba released Qwen3.8-27B on 14 August under an Apache 2.0 licence: 27 billion parameters, able to read images as well as text, a 256,000-token context window, and about 17GB once quantised, which puts it within reach of a single consumer graphics card. Artificial Analysis scores it 52 on its intelligence index, against a median of 9 for open-weight models of similar size. Developer Simon Willison then documented the catch: the model ships set to its highest reasoning effort. Asked to draw an SVG, it consumed 22,276 reasoning tokens to produce 3,223 tokens of output and took 21 minutes; the same request with reasoning switched off finished in 137 seconds using 3,715 tokens. Across its benchmark run Artificial Analysis measured 160 million tokens generated, against a median of 43 million.
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