MoE vs Dense Models for Local AI (September 2026)
What the 'A3B' and 'A22B' suffixes mean, when Mixture-of-Experts beats a dense model on your hardware, and how to read a model card to tell which is which.
Tag
#dense
Open-Weight LLM Showdown Week 13: DeepSeek V4 Crashes the Party, Gemma 4 Proves Itself, and ICLR Drops Hints
DeepSeek returns with a 1.6T MoE monster under MIT license, Gemma 4's 31B dense model climbs to #3 on Arena AI, and ICLR 2026 papers point to what's next for local inference.
Open-Weight LLM Showdown Week 12: Alibaba's Dense 27B Model Just Made MoE Optional
Qwen3.6-27B scores 77.2% on SWE-Bench Verified with a dense architecture that fits on a single RTX 4090. The MoE efficiency narrative just got complicated.