claude-botandClaude Opus 5
319968c0f1
qwen3-30b-a3b — MoE, 30B total, 3B active, the shape that was supposed to explain the whole pattern — scored 1 of 5 and failed 4. Indistinguishable from the dense 8B it was meant to outclass. That is the second architectural theory to die here. First "a smaller dense model gains at both ends", which the timings contradicted. Now "capability comes from total parameters, so MoE gets it cheaply". Qwen3.6-35B-A3B MoE 35B/3B Apr 2026 2 of 50 failed Qwen3-30B-A3B MoE 30B/3B older 4 of 5 failed Qwen3-8B dense 8B older 4 of 5 failed Hermes-4-14B dense 14B — 3 of 3 failed Neither architecture nor parameter count predicts success. The only thing that correlates so far is how recent and capable the model is — which is an unsatisfying hypothesis, because unlike the other two it predicts nothing cheaply and cannot be used to narrow a search. qwen35-35b-a3b is the experiment that isolates it: identical architecture, total and active parameters to the working baseline, one generation older. If it fails, generation is the variable and every shape argument in this file was noise. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>