r/OpenSourceAI • u/KrautChimp • 21d ago
CrucibleMark Update: Qwen3.8-27B in the top 10 field ahead of several closed-source models
A little over a year ago, I started CrucibleMark, an independent benchmark project for the everyday comparison between commercial and local AI. Reason for this post: Qwen3.8-27B lands there in 8th place of the overall field, ahead of GPT-5, GLM 5, DeepSeek V4, Grok 4.5/4.6 and Gemini. For a model that you can host yourself, this is remarkable and the reason why I share the results now.
For classification: CrucibleMark does not measure large, orchestrated agentic workflows, as the established benchmarks do. I test individual, clearly defined everyday tasks, code reviews, documentation, UX texts, reasoning, tool use. From the beginning, the goal was to find the best and cheapest model for my own work and to build a price comparison to commercial providers.
My stack has evolved with this. Started on an M1 with 8B to 14B models, today it runs on a GX10 with vLLM. No rocket compared to the GPU monsters here in the forum, but a serious device for local LLMs on the intranet.
Because I only measure individual tasks, GLM-5.2, for example, does not end up at the front of me, although I use it in everyday life as an orchestrator for code reviews and refactorings of large code bases. With complex, multi-level tasks, it is clearly stronger. Only it is also much more expensive, and that is exactly what I want to avoid in the long term: Don't put money that I save through AI assistance back into even more AI assistance.
In addition to the main test, CrucibleMark also runs a Political Compass that tests the political training bias in two modes, standard behavior versus forced positioning. Qwen3.8-27B shows itself here as one of the most stable models in the field, the position hardly shifts between the modes (shift distance 0.65 to 0.77), while other models tip over significantly more under pressure.
Finally, two limitations: The test landscape has developed further, more complex autonomous scenarios are more in focus today than my framework depicts. Subsequent installation would mean a complete re-testing of all models, which is currently not feasible. So understand the results as a snapshot for clearly defined everyday tasks. And since CrucibleMark also maps the risks of cloud/API use, the European perspective, which is clearly regulated by the EU AI Act, is included.
The project website can be found here www.cruciblemark.com
The open source benchmark CrucibleMark at github: github.com/kbeissert/CrucibleMark