id: Qwen__Qwen3-8B__candidate
status: candidate
name: Qwen3-8B
org: Qwen
source:
  kind: huggingface
  url: https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3-8B
  revision: main
  model_card_url: https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3-8B
  project_url: https://qwenlm.github.io/
license:
  spdx: Apache-2.0
  url: https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3-8B
  allows_offline_retention: true
  allows_local_ops: true
  allows_fine_tune: true
  notes: "Confirm exact card license at download time; Qwen3 line generally Apache-2.0."
profile:
  summary: "Default mid-small open instruct for local ops, tools, and domain fine-tunes."
  original_source: https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3-8B
  use_cases:
    - "Local NetKingdom / Coulomb assistant (chat, docs, runbooks)"
    - "Tool-using agent loops on consumer GPU"
    - "QLoRA / LoRA domain specialization base"
    - "Multilingual (incl. DE/EN) drafting and summarization"
    - "Offline code help when 14B+ is too heavy"
  sweet_spots:
    - "Best balance of quality vs VRAM in the ~8B open class for many 2026 stacks"
    - "Instruction + tool-use oriented workflows"
    - "Homelab fine-tune target (axis C)"
    - "Runnable spine default when one model must wear many hats"
  not_ideal_for:
    - "Hardest SWE-bench-class multi-file engineering (use larger or closed frontier)"
    - "Deep multi-step math/reason vs R1-class distill or full reasoners"
    - "Embedding / retrieval (use BGE-M3 or nomic)"
  capability_notes: >
    Flagship small-mid dense open generalist in the Qwen3 line. Strong multilingual
    and instruct behavior for its size; primary R-tier workhorse for the lab. Prefer
    Instruct sibling on the card if separate repo exists at pin time.
swot:
  strengths:
    - "High capability density at 8B; Apache-friendly licensing typical"
    - "Good multilingual + tool/instruct posture for local agents"
    - "Excellent FT base for domain specialization"
  weaknesses:
    - "Still far from frontier closed models on hard agentic coding"
    - "8B ceiling on long-horizon planning and rare knowledge"
  opportunities:
    - "Domain LoRAs (security, ops, railiance) on NAS-held base"
    - "Pair with BGE-M3 RAG for grounded NetKingdom answers"
  threats:
    - "Rapid supersession by next Qwen/peer 8–14B release"
    - "Quant quality variance across third-party GGUF repacks"
size:
  total_bytes: 0
  total_human: "~16 GB fp16 / ~5 GB Q4 (estimate)"
hardware_class:
  min_vram_gb_q4: 6
  min_vram_gb_fp16: 16
  notes: "Default T1–T2 general instruct and FT base"
axes: [B, C]
priority: high
collection:
  approved_by: ""
  approved_at: null
  downloaded_at: null
  downloaded_by: ""
  storage_path: ""
  brief_refs:
    - research/2026-07-24-baseline-field-survey.md
reason: "P0/R spine — best default open general/tool model for local ops and QLoRA domain specialization."
tags: [tier-r, instruct, text, qwen3, ft-base]
companions: []
notes: "Prefer Instruct variant on card if separate repo; pin commit SHA at collection."
history:
  - at: "2026-07-24"
    event: nominated
    by: baseline-survey
    detail: "P0 recommendation from initial deep research."
  - at: "2026-07-24"
    event: profile_swot_added
    by: grok
    detail: "schema 0.2 profile + SWOT."