China has caught up is the main takeaway here. The SOTA models are so close that it's really hard to compare them intelligence wise - you have to get a feel for them yourself and what works for you.
What I'm really excited for is the 27B model. 3.6 is still the king of local, and if 3.8 makes the same improvements it could really legitimately make local viable as a default. I'd love to run a perpetual agent on 3.8 that's locally driven.
I clicked through and it showed Qwen at the top at 55.4 compared to 55.3 for Opus Max. I have a screenshot.
Then I clicked away and back, and now it goes Qwen second, with 58.4, to Opus Max at top with 59.2.
I have screenshots of both. The description above the chart is the same in boh cases:
> Artificial Analysis Agentic Index
> Represents the weighted average of agentic capabilities benchmarks in the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index (GDPval-AA v2, ³-Banking)
What happened? How can the scores change so much in a few seconds?
I believe it. It's extremely good at troubleshooting. I gave Qwen and Kimi K3 the same annoying, complicated, intermittent bug to track down. Kimi did a bit better in understanding the existing code, but Qwen built some diagnostic tools and did an excellent statistical analysis on the log data. Qwen got way closer to the truth.
I'm very much looking forward to their forthcoming smaller model Qwen 3.8 releases. A version that can easily run locally would be great.
Anthropic is a bit nuts, I had $260 of credits on my max account for the extra usage the other night. It was expiring, so I figured I'll fire up an agentic swarm to deep dive and make some deep changes to some old cold bases.. literally 25 minutes or less, $260 burnt, it didn't get get into the implementation, just wrote a ton of useless plans for the most part. It really opened my eyes to what they expect to charge people.. wayyyy overpriced.
Hopefully this boils down to the smaller versions they've teased. In my experience, Qwen models are the closest to the "less knowledge, more intelligence" (yes, the two are hugely correlated!) ideal some tool-dependent tasks need. Even the 3.5 2B can be easily prompted to always lean on tools and not jump to false conclusions (although its actual coding skills are abysmal, as you'd expect).
I've been trying it on several projects and have found it's pretty sloppy. It leaves stuff broken, doesn't reliably write tests to check its own work unless explicitly prompted, misunderstands the assignment, etc.
It is smart and reasonably quick but not reliable.
Why does an open weights model cost nearly the same as GPT5.6? $1.14 vs $1.23 on the cost index. Since you can't presumably run this on your own hardware given the model size and hence gain other things like privacy, I don't see any reason to move away from GPT at this rate.
The fact that the Chinese models have caught up on benchmarks suggests to me that its likely we will start to transition now into much more of a brand war. It will be subjective qualities that drive our decisions more than measures of absolute intelligence. Already I am choosing models more because I like the personality or style of what they do than because I think they have the absolute highest chance of outputting the most technically correct answer to any given prompt. It will be very interesting to see how things evolve in this direction.
My vague equivalent of the pelican riding a bicycle test (for a local model without internets) is to ask it: "Where is Yeovil"? I don't expect a totally accurate answer for obvious reasons but I do enjoy watching the accuracy improve.
Qwen3.6-27B-FP8 currently espouses (see below), which is not too bad. The directions are a bit mad but the mileage is about right and there is a helicopter manufacturer here and a RNAS (navy not airforce) museum nearby at Yeovilton. Cosford is in Shropshire which is not a million miles away.
I'm not sure what 盆地的 means but the river Yeo is correct ... OK ... "basin like" - again not bad, even if Chinese is not the first language here. The model understands that Yeovil is named after (or vice versa or at least is associated with) a river
Yeovil is the current form of Gifle (Saxon) which I thought meant "bend in a river" but WP is currently saying "fork in a river". My source is a local museum. There is a fork but was it there 2000 odd years ago? My hydrology skills say ... possibly
----------------------------------------------------
Q: where is yeovil:
Yeovil is a town in Somerset, in the South West of England.
It is located roughly:
25 miles (40 km) south-west of Exeter
60 miles (100 km) west of Bristol
140 miles (225 km) west-south-west of London
Yeovil is known for its historic market town center, RAF Museum Cosford (nearby), and as a significant industrial town, particularly during World War II for aircraft manufacturing (including the Wellington bomber). It sits in the盆地的 valley of the River Yeo.
Haven't tried this yet, but going to soon! I have to wonder what happened at Anthropic. We've cancelled our subscription in favor of OpenCode & Codex. Sol is just so good & OC goes so far for every $ spent. Claude's become a pain to work with - average output with an annoying personality. Who knew this would be an issue even a year ago? In any case, loving the stuff from the Chinese models!
Anthropic have a real fight on their hands now. The competition is no longer 6 months behind, it's 6 days. If this had come out two or three weeks earlier this would be an absolute market leader on both quality and timeline.
It is also the most expensive open source frontier model, per task; cf. Cost per Intelligence Index Task. If it is as good as the benchmarks indicate it bodes well for Qwen and China. For my part, I'll pass; it is not on the Pareto frontier.
Qwen3.8 Max now ranked as the best overall model by agentic index
(artificialanalysis.ai)538 points by apitman 6 August 2026 | 343 comments
Comments
What I'm really excited for is the 27B model. 3.6 is still the king of local, and if 3.8 makes the same improvements it could really legitimately make local viable as a default. I'd love to run a perpetual agent on 3.8 that's locally driven.
Then I clicked away and back, and now it goes Qwen second, with 58.4, to Opus Max at top with 59.2.
I have screenshots of both. The description above the chart is the same in boh cases:
> Artificial Analysis Agentic Index > Represents the weighted average of agentic capabilities benchmarks in the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index (GDPval-AA v2, ³-Banking)
What happened? How can the scores change so much in a few seconds?
I'm very much looking forward to their forthcoming smaller model Qwen 3.8 releases. A version that can easily run locally would be great.
Our leaderboard combines Arena ELO, AA Intelligence index, latency and speed and goes: #1 Opus 5 #2 Kimi K3 #3 Qwen3.8 Max #4 GPT 5.6 Sol
Source: http://pellmell.ai/leaderboard.
This jumps around a lot based on the top throughput and latency of whatever provider happens to be best at the moment.
I've been trying it on several projects and have found it's pretty sloppy. It leaves stuff broken, doesn't reliably write tests to check its own work unless explicitly prompted, misunderstands the assignment, etc.
It is smart and reasonably quick but not reliable.
I wasn't able to find an explanation from them. Anyone knows what happened?
Qwen3.6-27B-FP8 currently espouses (see below), which is not too bad. The directions are a bit mad but the mileage is about right and there is a helicopter manufacturer here and a RNAS (navy not airforce) museum nearby at Yeovilton. Cosford is in Shropshire which is not a million miles away.
I'm not sure what 盆地的 means but the river Yeo is correct ... OK ... "basin like" - again not bad, even if Chinese is not the first language here. The model understands that Yeovil is named after (or vice versa or at least is associated with) a river
Yeovil is the current form of Gifle (Saxon) which I thought meant "bend in a river" but WP is currently saying "fork in a river". My source is a local museum. There is a fork but was it there 2000 odd years ago? My hydrology skills say ... possibly
---------------------------------------------------- Q: where is yeovil:
Yeovil is a town in Somerset, in the South West of England.
It is located roughly:
Yeovil is known for its historic market town center, RAF Museum Cosford (nearby), and as a significant industrial town, particularly during World War II for aircraft manufacturing (including the Wellington bomber). It sits in the盆地的 valley of the River Yeo.Clearly the weighting of those things depends on the usecase