Qwen3.8 27B Addition-in-Words Test Replicated on Local Hardware
Simon Willison replicated Colin Frasier's GPT-4o addition-in-words experiment using Qwen3.8-27B on a DGX Spark, with and without reasoning enabled. With reasoning disabled, 30 attempts per combination were run; with reasoning enabled, only one attempt per pair due to longer processing time.
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Simon Willison
Research: Qwen3.8 27B addition in words Colin Frasier posted on Bluesky about an experiment he ran over two years ago using GPT-4o to see how well it could "compute the sum but return the answer in words" across increasingly large numbers. Here's the chart he shared of those results: I'm confident GPT-4o didn't cheat and use a calculator, especially since it got so many of the calculations wrong, but I was inspired to run the experiment again on local hardware (a DGX Spark) to explore the effect in a fully controlled environment. I pasted his image into a Codex Remote session (GPT-6 Astra) and had it run the same experiment using Qwen3.8-27B-Q4_K_M.gguf . Here's the result for a run of 30 attempts per combination with reasoning disabled: Then I ran it again with reasoning enabled. This took a lot longer per pair, so instead of running 30 samples per square I ran just one - which results in a much less visually appealing heatmap since each square is either 100% or 0%: It got the right a
