Qwen 4 — who actually has the preview, and what they're saying

"Qwen 4.0 (preview) is here… on par with Astra, Opus 5.5"

Source: @coffeecup2020 on X — quoted across r/LocalLLaMA as the flagship tester quote

• The single most-shared first-hand claim of the weekend; spread to Reddit within hours.
• Note the hedging built in: "as far as I can see," "early testing snapshot."

@loktar00: access is coming through the "Qwen Ambassador program"

Source: @loktar00 on X, linked from the r/LocalLLaMA hype-check thread

• Explains how regular people are getting preview tokens right now: an ambassador/early-partner program plus Qwen Code early access.
• Corroborated in Reddit comments: "There is preview access on their website and rumored access on arena."

"testing Qoduck (Maybe qwen4) on Qoder"

Source: r/LocalLLaMA thread by u/Consistent_Berry_324

• OP reports Qoduck (the free Qoder stealth model) appears to have native image AND video generation output — not just text — which commenters find hard to believe for a Flash/27B tier ("One model to rule them all").
• Thread discusses whether that's true omni output vs. tool-calls to a separate generator; someone recalls the rumored "Qwen 4 Flash Omni" naming.

"Contrary to what the hype train may suggest: qwen-4 weights have not been released"

Source: r/LocalLLaMA thread by u/Terminator857

• The necessary counterweight: preview ≠ release. Points to the official Qwen Hugging Face page as the place to watch for real weights.
• "It's probably been in arena for a while under a different codename… the race to download them will be insane."

"Qwen 4 is about to be released" — kept up by a mod because the discussion is actually technical

Source: r/LocalLLaMA (mod u/ttkciar)

• Claim circulating: the lineup will skip small tiers — no 4B / 9B / 35B MoE, so 8GB-GPU owners may wait for a "Flash" variant.
• Sharp catch from a commenter: Alibaba quietly polished the Qwen3.8-Flash-Next model card on ModelScope (benchmark-table styling commits) — classic "prepping the house before guests arrive" release behavior.

Alibaba leaked Qwen 4 model names in its own public code

Source: @IntCyberDigest on X, tracking a Qwen Code repo merge from Oct 28

• Merged code names qwen4-coder-plus and tests reference qwen4-omni-120b-think; every "qwen4" model ID got a 1M-token context default.
• The engineer who wrote it called the 1M figure an inference from naming, not a measured capability — a detail most hype threads dropped.

"Qwen4 and Kimi3.1 on Arena apparently" — where the Kalmia story started

Source: r/LocalLLaMA

• The original Arena claim: an anonymous checkpoint called Kalmia had fingerprint characteristics matching Qwen models.
• Includes early skepticism that still holds: Arena leaderboard screenshots for unreleased models are assumptions, not verified lineups — "people faking AA benchmarks for unreleased models."

Alibaba's Qoder makes a mystery coding model called Qoduck free to use

Ron Patel — the most concrete Qoduck writeup, built on Qoder's own docs

• Qoduck appeared Nov 7; individual plans (Free → Ultra) get a daily allowance at zero credits at any thinking level, then 0.5× the standard rate. Team/Enterprise are excluded. End date "yet to be determined."
• Alibaba Cloud's official X line: a stealth model — "Don't ask where it came from."
• The "it's Qwen 4" case is laid out and then deflated: circumstantial (0.5× rate, rumored 1M context, Nov 6 teaser timing). No independent benchmark exists, and Qoder itself warns responses may be slow at peak — early users confirm.
• Best practical advice of anything read: run it on a real repo at the hours you actually work, and compare against what you pay today.

Qwen 4 Release Date: Alibaba Teases, No Date Yet

A living tracker that logs confirmed facts with dates; explicitly notes "no specs, no benchmarks, no price" for Qoduck beyond its 0.5× credit rate, and that no Qwen 4 repo exists on Hugging Face.

Qwen 4: Release Date, Kalmia, 27B, Max & Flash

Tracks anonymous Arena models day by day: Kalmia left the Arena Oct 23 and returned with new checkpoints registered that night and the next; tokenizer quirks point to the Qwen family — "but not to Qwen 4 by name." As of Nov 7: no weights, no model card, and Qwen's LLM lead publicly saying the series is "about to arrive."

Qwen 4 Launch: Alibaba's Open-Source Promise in Doubt

The counter-narrative: after 470 models of open-weight history, Qwen 4's launch behavior (closed preview, teaser, stealth API model) has the community worried the release tier might not be fully open-weight. Good balance to the hype.

Qwen 4 Release Date: What We Know  ·  Release Date, What's Confirmed, How to Prepare

Two careful explainer posts. Useful for the timeline (Qwen 3.5 shipped Feb 2026; Flash-Next previewed the Qwen 4 architecture Aug 26; Sep 22 Apsara confirmed Max/Plus/Flash/27B tiers "in training") and both are explicit that as of Nov 5–7 no date, price, or weights existed.

QWEN 4 Preview IS INSANE! First Look at Qwen 4 Max & 27B!

Biggest-channel hands-on of the weekend — the creator shows his own screen with early Qwen 4 access inside Qwen Code.

• What he ran: a full Minecraft clone — shaders, day/night cycle, inventory, caves, lava, mobs, sound effects — built autonomously; a Roman Colosseum scene (~69K tokens on plain "high" thinking); an Arena battle where the "Curio" checkpoint beat GPT-6.1-Terra on a 2D-RPG-village prompt in his judgment ("more lively"); and a Hermes-agent-built interactive bioreactor/insulin simulation that correctly modeled oxygen-stall → alarm.
• Feedback he gives: dramatically better visual taste and web-dev capability than Qwen 3.8; calls it closest thing he's seen to early Opus/Fable-level output from an open-weight team. Minor gripes: slower generations, a small bug trapping the player underwater.
• Also reports: early partners/beta testers got access Nov 7; a partner accidentally posted then deleted a Qwen 4 Max promo image showing 1M context, image support, tool calling, and a free-token launch promo; Arena codenames Kalmia/Kiria/Enzia/Mura; the Alibaba Cloud CTO said "next week" at Apsara Amsterdam (Oct 29).

Free Qwen 4 vs Claude Opus 5.5?

The most concrete apples-to-apples test of Qoduck so far — same prompt, same real app, 10-minute timer.

• The race: he adds a "jet-lag coach" agent feature to his real 8-month-old wearables app (WellView AI) simultaneously in Claude Code/Opus 5.5 and Qoder/Qoduck. Qoduck finished in ~7 minutes; Opus 5.5 hit the 10-minute cap unfinished. Output quality: followed the app's theme, working map and flight path — respectable.
• Evidence chain he assembles: Aug architecture preview whose config literally says "qwen4_exp"; Sept "in training" announcement; Oct 28 repo merge sizing qwen4 at 1M context; Nov 6 teaser; Qoduck Nov 7 — then he hedges honestly: the duck is Qoder's mascot (name proves nothing) and Qoder gave away a DeepSeek model for free last month too.
• Architecture rundown (from the Flash-Next preview): gated DeltaNet linear attention on 3 of 4 layers + a top-k indexer over ~512 blocks, 125B params / 512 experts with ~11 active (~6B), a 20M-phrase lookup table (~51B params), four gated residual lanes — "a model built for agents."

Qwen 4 Might Already Be Here (Hidden as "Qoduck")

Shortest but most rigorous Qoduck analysis — argues both sides before landing a verdict.

• For: Qoder is Alibaba's; "don't ask where it came from" is Alibaba's own line; timing (CTO "next week" → teaser → Qoduck next day); a tester's tokenizer-fingerprint check says Qwen family; 1M-context switch matches the Oct repo change.
• Performance anecdotes: same prompt: Qoduck built an app in 29.5 min vs Qwen 3.8 Max's 1h55m; beat DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 40 min vs 70. (Single runs, queue noise possible.)
• Against: no model card, no weights, no API; the earlier Arena codenames (Kalmia/Kiria/Kintia) were "confirmed Qwen 4" too — and never were.
• Verdict: probably a Qwen 4 model; can't tell tier — pricing signal points to Max, speed points to 27B (it has a draft-module that speculates 4 tokens ahead). Ends promising real local benchmarks the day weights drop.

Qwen 4 Preview Is HERE?! Testers Say 27B Matches Opus 5.5 (Unconfirmed)

Most useful because it attributes each preview claim to a named person instead of "people say."

• David Wan: a Qwen 4 27B preview is live, initial results look good, sample output has "more detail than Qwen 3.8 27B," model still being hot-swapped.
• Vincent Yu: his team has invite access to a Qwen 4 build of unknown size; "beating Qwen 3.8 Max in human eval, mostly similar on other bench — if this is a small model it's beating even the big ones."
• Joey: "Qwen 4 is in my hands and I can't stop grinning" — single-prompt N-body gravity sim, hundreds of bodies, live in browser.
• Rich (Atom Studio): same prompt/thinking level, Qwen 3.8 Max vs Qoduck — the "Qoduck is worse than Max" claim is "simply not true" in his test. Fatih: the checkpoint is second only to Opus 5.5 on his game-dev benchmark, "state-of-the-art for open source" (own benchmark, take carefully).
• Also: Unsloth replying "we are so ready" to running Qwen 4 locally; teaser viewed 2.5M times; explicit pushback quoted ("Opus 5.5 will not be beaten anytime soon").

Qwen 4 Preview: Real Demos, Flash-Next Benchmarks & How to Run It

The intelligence check of the weekend — the best "how should you evaluate these demos" video.

• Separates interactive demos (Lenia cells that regrow when cut, an oxygen-slider bioreactor — both built with a Hermes agent and early Qwen access) from benchmark claims: on the model card, Flash-Next is 91.7 vs Claude Opus 4.6 Max's 91.3 on GPQA Diamond, but the order flips on Humanity's Last Exam (35.9 vs 40) — "I wouldn't buy a service on one row."
• Corrects two circulating errors: the "1M context" line in Qwen Code is a client-side fallback for model names, not a measured capability; the Arena agent-leaderboard row shown for Qwen is for Flash-Next 3.8, not a Qwen 4 result.
• Explains the million-token spec natively vs extended (≈262K native on the published checkpoint).
• Best advice on the page's whole topic: freeze a commit in your own repo, give each model identical instructions/tools/time budget, run the tests, read the diff before the model's summary — "the question I keep coming back to is: what happens on the second attempt?"

Qwen3.8 Flash Next Is INSANE – Testing the PREVIEW of Qwen 4!

Background: the day the actual Qwen 4 architecture preview (Qwen3.8-Flash-Next) landed in August — a long-form agentic-coding stress test.

• Built a retro "browser OS" (period-accurate screensavers, email client, Time Machine snapshots), then a C++ low-poly rally game with no reference material — drifting, crashes, crowds, menu, E-brake — after explicitly banning raylib.
• His verdict, from the transcript: "this is a result that would have eclipsed a state-of-the-art model from a year ago… the fact that this is a preview model of the next generation should be very, very bullish."

You Don't Need GPUs: Qwen 4's Preview Is WILDLY Fast

Background math on running the August Qwen 4-architecture preview locally — unusually honest about limits.

• Memory tiers: ~75 GB RAM works with Unsloth's 1-bit build (zero VRAM); 4-bit needs ~96–130 GB. Real first-week numbers: DGX Spark ~25 tok/s from NVMe; M5 Max 128GB ~60–73 tok/s.
• Documented week-one problems: occasional non-terminating "reasoning loops" (community + Qwen's own report), measurably verbose output (200M tokens burned on Artificial Analysis's index vs 110M median), and a license catch: reselling it as a coding-assistant API needs a separate commercial deal.
• API pricing anchor: $0.15 in / $0.47 out per million tokens, flat to 1M context.

• Confirmed facts: the Nov 6 teaser, the Qoduck listing in Qoder (Nov 7, free daily quota), the four planned tiers (Max / Plus / Flash / 27B, per the Sept 22 Apsara announcement), and the Aug 26 architecture preview with 1M-token target.
• Strong consensus, unconfirmed: Qoduck ≈ a Qwen 4 build (Qoder is Alibaba's, tokenizer check matches, timing fits). Nobody can name the tier.
• Single-source, take carefully: every capability claim — "on par with Opus 5.5-class," native video output, 78.6% SWE-bench rumors — comes from one tester or one vendor benchmark each.
• Not out at all: weights, license, model card, price, release date. If someone says Qwen 4 "released," they're ahead of the evidence. Watch huggingface.co/Qwen and the Qwen X account — that's where the truth will actually land.