id: Qwen__Qwen3-14B__candidate
status: candidate
name: Qwen3-14B
org: Qwen
source:
  kind: huggingface
  url: https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3-14B
  revision: main
  model_card_url: https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3-14B
  project_url: https://qwenlm.github.io/
license:
  spdx: Apache-2.0
  url: https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3-14B
  allows_offline_retention: true
  allows_local_ops: true
  allows_fine_tune: true
  notes: "Confirm card at download."
profile:
  summary: "Mid-size Qwen3 step up from 8B for stronger single-GPU chat/code."
  original_source: https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3-14B
  use_cases:
    - "Higher-quality local assistant when 8B is the bottleneck"
    - "Harder coding and long-context drafting on T2 GPUs"
    - "A/B baseline vs R1-Distill-14B (general vs reason-specialist)"
    - "Domain FT when 8B capacity is insufficient"
  sweet_spots:
    - "Quality step within still-single-GPU open dense class"
    - "Multilingual instruct continuity with Qwen3-8B"
    - "Quota-friendly alternative to jumping to 70B"
  not_ideal_for:
    - "Always-on default if VRAM is tight (prefer 8B)"
    - "Deepest reasoner tasks (prefer R1 distill or full R1 reserve)"
    - "Embedding / retrieval"
  capability_notes: >
    W-tier optional after R spine. Collect when soft-quota headroom and a clear
    quality gap vs Qwen3-8B show up in daily work. Prefer Instruct sibling if
    separate at pin time.
swot:
  strengths:
    - "Clear capability bump over 8B without 70B cost"
    - "Same Qwen3 stack and tooling as the R default"
    - "Apache-friendly licensing typical"
  weaknesses:
    - "Near-duplicate niche vs strong 8B + selective 14B reason distill"
    - "Still not frontier closed quality on hard agentic SWE"
  opportunities:
    - "Promote to R if lab defaults move off 8B"
    - "FT target when domain data needs more capacity"
  threats:
    - "Disk spent better on S1 MoE or 70B dense under tight quota"
    - "Next Qwen mid-size may obsolete this checkpoint quickly"
size:
  total_bytes: 0
  total_human: "~28 GB fp16 / ~9 GB Q4 (estimate)"
hardware_class:
  min_vram_gb_q4: 10
  min_vram_gb_fp16: 28
  notes: "T2 quality step"
axes: [B, C]
priority: medium
collection:
  approved_by: ""
  approved_at: null
  downloaded_at: null
  downloaded_by: ""
  storage_path: ""
  brief_refs:
    - research/2026-07-24-baseline-field-survey.md
reason: "P1/W — stronger single-GPU chat/code when quota allows after R spine."
tags: [tier-w, instruct, qwen3]
companions:
  - Qwen__Qwen3-8B__candidate
notes: ""
history:
  - at: "2026-07-24"
    event: nominated
    by: baseline-survey
    detail: "P1 recommendation from initial deep research."
  - at: "2026-07-28"
    event: profile_swot_added
    by: grok
    detail: "schema 0.2 profile + SWOT."
  - at: "2026-07-28"
    event: decision_pass
    by: bernd
    detail: "W — stay candidate until R+S headroom"