Qwen/Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507

Qwen/Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507. New model update from Qwen, improving on their previous Qwen3-30B-A3B release from late April. In their tweet they said:

Smarter, faster, and local deployment-friendly.

✨ Key Enhancements:
✅ Enhanced reasoning, coding, and math skills
✅ Broader multilingual knowledge
✅ Improved long-context understanding (up to 256K tokens)
✅ Better alignment with user intent and open-ended tasks
✅ No more <think> blocks — now operating exclusively in non-thinking mode

🔧 With 3B activated parameters, it's approaching the performance of GPT-4o and Qwen3-235B-A22B Non-Thinking

I tried the chat.qwen.ai hosted model with "Generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle" and got this:

This one is cute: blue sky, green grass, the sun is shining. The bicycle is a red block with wheels that looks more like a toy car. The pelican doesn't look like a pelican and has a quirky smile printed on its beak.

I particularly enjoyed this detail from the SVG source code:

<!-- Bonus: Pelican's smile -->
<path d="M245,145 Q250,150 255,145" fill="none" stroke="#d4a037" stroke-width="2"/>

I went looking for quantized versions that could fit on my Mac and found lmstudio-community/Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507-MLX-8bit from LM Studio. Getting that up and running was a 32.46GB download and it appears to use just over 30GB of RAM.

The pelican I got from that one wasn't as good:

It looks more like a tall yellow hen chick riding a segway

I then tried that local model on the "Write an HTML and JavaScript page implementing space invaders" task that I ran against GLM-4.5 Air. The output looked promising, in particular it seemed to be putting more effort into the design of the invaders (GLM-4.5 Air just used rectangles):

// Draw enemy ship
ctx.fillStyle = this.color;

// Ship body
ctx.fillRect(this.x, this.y, this.width, this.height);

// Enemy eyes
ctx.fillStyle = '#fff';
ctx.fillRect(this.x + 6, this.y + 5, 4, 4);
ctx.fillRect(this.x + this.width - 10, this.y + 5, 4, 4);

// Enemy antennae
ctx.fillStyle = '#f00';
if (this.type === 1) {
    // Basic enemy
    ctx.fillRect(this.x + this.width / 2 - 1, this.y - 5, 2, 5);
} else if (this.type === 2) {
    // Fast enemy
    ctx.fillRect(this.x + this.width / 4 - 1, this.y - 5, 2, 5);
    ctx.fillRect(this.x + (3 * this.width) / 4 - 1, this.y - 5, 2, 5);
} else if (this.type === 3) {
    // Armored enemy
    ctx.fillRect(this.x + this.width / 2 - 1, this.y - 8, 2, 8);
    ctx.fillStyle = '#0f0';
    ctx.fillRect(this.x + this.width / 2 - 1, this.y - 6, 2, 3);
}

But the resulting code didn't actually work:

Black screen - a row of good looking space invaders advances across the screen for a moment... and then the entire screen goes blank.

That same prompt against the unquantized Qwen-hosted model produced a different result which sadly also resulted in an unplayable game - this time because everything moved too fast.

This new Qwen model is a non-reasoning model, whereas GLM-4.5 and GLM-4.5 Air are both reasoners. It looks like at this scale the "reasoning" may make a material difference in terms of getting code that works out of the box.

Posted 29th July 2025 at 6:57 pm

Simon Willison’s Weblog

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