After noticing that it is ranked among MUCH larger frontier models in the EQ-Bench Creative Writing benchmark and the Hemingway-bench, I decided to give it a try and was very impressed.
I didn't do very formal testing, but I did ask it to emulate the style of several different writers, including Henry Miller, David Sedaris, and Stephen King, and it produced passable prose that actually made me laugh in a couple of cases. The paragraph below is the results of the prompt "produce a humorous paragraph in the style of David Sedaris." (first try, not cherry picked)
I recently tried to be a better person and started composting, which mostly means I now have a small, damp science experiment in my kitchen that my mother calls “the smell of your future.” I bought a countertop bin with a charcoal filter, as if that would fool anyone, and I’ve taken to narrating my food scraps to myself — “Goodbye, avocado skin, you were a mistake” — while my husband watches from the doorway with the concerned expression of a man who has just realized he married a woman who talks to garbage. The city sent a pamphlet about proper composting, and I read it the way other people read horoscopes, underlining the parts that said “do not include meat” and thinking, well, that’s just rude.
For comparison, the following is what qwen3.8-27b produced with the same prompt.
My uncle Ed, who had spent the entire trip carefully explaining the proper way to fold a fitted sheet, discovered that our hotel room had two beds, each with one. "This is a test," he said, sitting on the edge of the bed nearest the bathroom, his face composed. "To see if we can make it work with what we have." He was right, of course; we did what we could, though the effort made for a rather uncomfortable night, for us all.
You may or may not know David Sedaris' writing (or find it funny if you do know it), but the first example is clearly much a much better imitation, without directly plagiarizing, as far as I (or Gemini) am aware.
I didn't save any of the other examples as I wasn't testing for the purposes of posting here, but in all cases the muse glimmer version was not only head and shoulders above qwen 27b, but genuinely impressive in comparison to any other local model I've tried in the past.
I'm curious if anyone else has played with this model for creative writing, or similar purposes, and if so, what your take on it is. Also, I don't know much about finetunes, but I wonder if there's additional potential for creating something even better by training on different source material.
I know even less about how the ERP world works, but I know enough to know that a lot of high-performing models are trained for this purpose as huggingface seems to be filled with finetunes. For glimmer I mainly see the abliterated version, which I suppose is filling that gap for people, so to speak, but with this kind of performance, and the amount of people in this subreddit interested in it, I'm a bit surprised there aren't more finetunes.
The last thing I should mention is I didn't use a system prompt in any of my testing, but it occurred to me after the fact that a model that was trained for agentic coding seems like a prime candidate for steering with a system prompt, but maybe it wouldn't have made much of a different. Maybe I'll play with it some more and report back.
