Swift-Qwen3.8-27B, -58.3% thinking, x1.95 speed, accuracy of xhigh
Hi everybody, we post-trained Qwen 3.8 27B to be more efficient by figuring out which tokens were linked to overthinking and penalizing them without "attacking" the reasoning length directly then fixed the accuracy with a bit of secret sauce (hint On-Policy Distillation) and achieved great results (-58% length, 1.95x speed up, <1% accuracy loss) so we wanted to open-source it and hear the feedback of the community.This is the link to the model: https://huggingface.co/ukisai/Swift-Qwen3.8-27b / It's at 80k downloads in 3 days with independent evals here: https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1wg7dd5/ukisai_...We are also providing a Free Research Purpose API (OpenAI compatible), courtesy of Nvidia who were kind enough to provide us with the GPUs. It's limited at 5RPM. https://ukisai.com/api/swift/v1/modelsWe also made a GGUF (Q1-Q8): https://huggingface.co/ukisai/Swift-Qwen3.8-27B-GGUF and there's also a few nice community quants with even lower/higher precision (Bartowski: https://huggingface.co/bartowski/ukisai_Swift-Qwen3.8-27b-GG...). The community also created amazing MLX, NVFP4, W4A16 and Uncensored versions you can find on Huggingface.IMPORTANT: Our training approach is not a replacement for the reasoning effort settings, chat templates or token caps but is complementary and targets a completely separate issue (overthinking and "anxiety-like" reasoning loops prior seen in PTQ, but as far as we identified also prominent in BF16 of this size class LLMs as well). Contrary to popular belief, these specific patterns do not contribute to answer quality when properly targeted. (our thesis being: reasoning length IS extremely important and should NOT be shortened by force, but rather optimized). This is also demonstrated bellow in our xhigh vs medium effort benchmark. The goal is to keep xhi
FL score
out of 100
Verdict
high confidence
Competition
No competitor data yet
Trend
No signal yet
A technically strong open-source LLM optimization that gained fast traction but lacks a clear monetization path or defensible market position.
The pain
The gap
Build angle
Strengths
- Technical execution is real and verified by independent community testing on Reddit.
- 80k downloads in 3 days shows genuine developer interest and product-market fit at the awareness stage.
- The optimization targets a specific problem (overthinking loops) rather than generic compression, making it harder to copy.
- Multiple distribution formats (GGUF, MLX, quantized versions) show thoughtful product design for different use cases.
- Nvidia partnership for free API infrastructure removes initial capital barrier.
Risks
- Open-source model with free API generates zero revenue and no clear path to paid tier that users will accept.
- Larger model providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta) can incorporate this optimization into their own models, eliminating the advantage.
- The 5 requests per minute rate limit on free API is too restrictive to drive meaningful usage or data collection.
- No defensible IP if the training approach becomes public knowledge or is reverse-engineered from the model weights.
- Market for local LLM inference is shrinking as cloud inference becomes cheaper and easier, reducing total addressable market.
- Founders have not articulated who specifically will pay for this or why they would choose this over alternatives.
Fly Labs Method
Is the pain real, is there a gap, is it the right time, can one person build it.
- Problem clarity
- 72
- Solution gap
- 68
- Willingness to pay
- 55
- Buildability
- 53
The problem of LLM inefficiency is real and the technical solution works, but the business model for monetizing an open-source model with a rate-limited free API remains unclear.
Value Equation
Dream outcome and how likely it feels, against the time and effort it costs.
Strong technical execution and early traction (80k downloads in 3 days) but no clear path to revenue or defensible competitive advantage in a crowded open-source LLM space.
One-Person Business
Curiosity pull, identity fit, and a path from free value to paid for a solo creator.
The team has demonstrated genuine technical skill by solving a specific optimization problem that others missed, but the market for this particular efficiency gain is not yet proven to have paying customers.
Viral Frameworks
Hook strength, shareability, and how cheaply it can be tested.
This is a solid technical contribution that solves a real problem for developers running local models, but it competes against free alternatives and lacks a clear business model beyond API credits.
Builder Lens
Evidence the problem exists, timing, defensibility, and a model that fits on a napkin.
Early community validation is strong and the technical approach is novel, but the founders need to identify a specific customer segment willing to pay and build a sustainable unit economics model.
Five lenses, one composite. How scoring works
The angle
No market research recorded for this idea yet.
Semble – Code search for agents that uses 98% fewer tokens than grep
Hey HN! We (Stephan and Thomas) recently open-sourced Semble. We kept running into the same problem while using Claude Code on large codebases: when the agent can't find something directly, it falls back to grep, reading full files or launching subagents. This uses a lot of tokens, and often still misses the relevant code. There are existing tools for this, but they were either too slow to index on demand, needed API keys, or had poor retrieval quality.Semble is our solution for this. It combines static Model2Vec embeddings (using our latest static model: potion-code-16M) with BM25, fused via RRF and reranked with code-aware signals. Everything runs on CPU since there's no transformers involved. On our benchmark of ~1250 query/document pairs across 63 repos and 19 languages, it uses 98% fewer tokens than grep+read and reaches 99% of the retrieval quality of a 137M-parameter code-trained transformer, while being ~200x faster.Main features:- Token-efficient: 98% fewer tokens than grep+read- Fast: ~250ms to index a typical repo on our benchmark, ~1.5ms per query on CPU (very large repos may take longer)- Accurate: 0.854 NDCG@10, 99% of the best transformer setup we tested- MCP server: drop-in for Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, OpenCode- Zero config: no API keys, no GPU, no external servicesInstall in Claude Code with: claude mcp add semble -s user -- uvx --from "semble[mcp]" sembleOr check our README for other installation instructions, benchmarks, and methodology:Semble: https://github.com/MinishLab/sembleBenchmarks: https://github.com/MinishLab/semble/tree/main/benchmarksModel: https://huggingface.co/minishlab/potion-code-16MLet us know if you have any feedback or questions!
AI
Postgres extension for BM25 relevance-ranked full-text search
Last summer we faced a conundrum at my company, Tiger Data, a Postgres cloud vendor whose main business is in timeseries data. We were trying to grow our business towards emerging AI-centric workloads and wanted to provide a state-of-the-art hybrid search stack in Postgres. We'd already built pgvectorscale in house with the goal of scaling semantic search beyond pgvector's main memory limitations. We just needed a scalable ranked keyword search solution too.The problem: core Postgres doesn't provide this; the leading Postgres BM25 extension, ParadeDB, is guarded behind AGPL; developing our own extension appeared daunting. We'd need a small team of sharp engineers and 6-12 months, I figured. And we'd probably still fall short of the performance of a mature system like Parade/Tantivy.Or would we? I'd be experimenting long enough with AI-boosted development at that point to realize that with the latest tools (Claude Code + Opus) and an experienced hand (I've been working in database systems internals for 25 years now), the old time estimates pretty much go out the window.I told our CTO I thought I could solo the project in one quarter. This raised some eyebrows.It did take a little more time than that (two quarters), and we got some real help from the community (amazing!) after open-sourcing the pre-release. But I'm thrilled/exhausted today to share that pg_textsearch v1.0 is freely available via open source (Postgres license), on Tiger Data cloud, and hopefully soon, a hyperscalar near you:https://github.com/timescale/pg_textsearchIn the blog post accompanying the release, I overview the architecture and present benchmark results using MS-MARCO. To my surprise, we were not only able to meet Parade/Tantivy's query performance, but exceed it substantially, measuring a 4.7x advantage on query throughput at scale:https://www.tigerdata.com/blog/pg-textsearch-bm25-fu
AI
Consus (YC F24) – LLM gateway for companies handling sensitive data
Hey Hacker News! I'm Eric, the founder of Consus. We route all AI requests to ITAR restricted and controlled unclassified information (CUI) compliant infrastructure. Consus itself satisfies ITAR restrictions, and we recently completed our FedRAMP equivalency audit against the 410 FedRAMP High controls. FedRAMP High is the U.S. government’s strictest security baseline for cloud services handling sensitive unclassified data. A breach of this data could cause severe or catastrophic harm. Achieving FedRAMP equivalency, or authorization, is required before processing CUI information.Demo: https://youtu.be/6MYxJe6P4oYAerospace and defense is experiencing rapid growth. Unfortunately, most companies are struggling to use AI because of necessary data protections & compliance risk. These companies can move even faster if they could use the AI tools that most other industries take for granted.I spent most of my career prior to Consus in aerospace & defense. I launched national security payloads at SpaceX, and was an early employee at Castelion. I’ve watched first hand how compliance red-tape makes it difficult for companies to adopt new technologies and trust vendors that touch their sensitive data. For example, I worked with a satellite manufacturer that doesn’t allow any AI tools, even for non-sensitive work.Even as AI has become extremely useful over the past 9-12 months, I was surprised by how many aerospace & defense companies refused to touch it. They could see how it could be helpful, but they were scared about model providers training on their data, violating an ITAR rule, or risk losing new business because of a failed cyber assessment. These are all rational fears.There were a lot of ways to solve some/all of these problems, but we focused on building a compliant AI inference layer that can "plug" into any AI tool or workflow. Just as OpenRouter integrates with most tools, Consus can connect to tools like ChatGPT or Clau
AI
Questions about this idea?
FlyBot reads the scoring and gives you a second opinion on “Swift-Qwen3.8-27B, -58.3% thinking, x1.95 speed, accuracy of xhigh”.