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Trying the Qwen3-8B Model Locally

I have been hearing a lot of good things about the qwen3-8b model lately, in fact, I also read about it in a post by Simon.

So, I had to try it and I will be sharing my learnings in this post.

Installation

I use Ollama so the installation process was easy, I just ran the following terminal command and the model got installed within a minute. You can visit the Ollama page for qwen3 here.

ollama run qwen3:8b

For the 8b model, it downloaded a 5.2GB file.

Initial testing

At first, I just sent "hi" and then only I got to know that it's a thinking model as its thoughts were being shown between <think> </think> tags. And then it replied with "Hello! 😊 How can I assist you today?" as you can see in the below screenshot.

Running Qwen3-8B model via Ollama

I am using a MacBook M2 Air 16GB device and the evaluation rate was 16.34 tokens per second, as you can see in the above screenshot.

Coding test

I asked it to generate a simple tic-tac-toe game by giving it the following prompt:

create a tic tac toe game in python

And, to my surprise, it created the best tic-tac-toe game I have ever played in the terminal and it ran without any errors. If you want to take a look, below is the Python code that it gave me:

def check_winner(board, player):
    # Check rows
    for row in board:
        if row[0] == row[1] == row[2] == player:
            return True
    # Check columns
    for col in range(3):
        if board[0][col] == board[1][col] == board[2][col] == player:
            return True
    # Check diagonals
    if board[0][0] == board[1][1] == board[2][2] == player:
        return True
    if board[0][2] == board[1][1] == board[2][0] == player:
        return True
    return False

def is_draw(board):
    for row in board:
        if ' ' in row:
            return False
    return True

def print_board(board):
    for row in board:
        print('|'.join(row))
    print()

def main():
    board = [[' ' for _ in range(3)] for _ in range(3)]
    current_player = 'X'

    while True:
        print_board(board)
        while True:
            try:
                move = int(input(f"Player {current_player}, enter your move (1-9): "))
                if 1 <= move <= 9:
                    row = (move - 1) // 3
                    col = (move - 1) % 3
                    if board[row][col] == ' ':
                        board[row][col] = current_player
                        break
                    else:
                        print("Cell already occupied. Try again.")
                else:
                    print("Invalid input. Please enter a number between 1 and 9.")
            except ValueError:
                print("Invalid input. Please enter a number between 1 and 9.")

        if check_winner(board, current_player):
            print_board(board)
            print(f"Player {current_player} wins!")
            break
        if is_draw(board):
            print_board(board)
            print("It's a draw!")
            break
        current_player = 'O' if current_player == 'X' else 'X'

if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

It looks like this when you play the game - it perfectly handles the win, lose, and draw cases.

| | | |
| | | |
| | | |
Player X, enter your move (1-9): 1
|X| | |
| | | |
| | | |
Player O, enter your move (1-9): 5
|X| | |
| |O| |
| | | |
Player X, enter your move (1-9): 3
|X| |X|
| |O| |
| | | |
Player O, enter your move (1-9): 7
|X| |X|
| |O| |
|O| | |
Player X, enter your move (1-9): 9
|X| |X|
| |O| |
|O| |X|
Player O, enter your move (1-9): 4
|X| |X|
|O|O| |
|O| |X|
Player X, enter your move (1-9): 6
|X| |X|
|O|O|X|
|O| |X|
Player O, enter your move (1-9): 8
|X| |X|
|O|O|X|
|O|O|X|
Player X, enter your move (1-9): 2
|X|X|X|
|O|O|X|
|O|O|X|
Player X wins!

But the only issue was, it took approximately 12 minutes to give the output as it kept thinking and thinking. I am sure that it's due to my computer's power, and it would have been faster on a computer with higher configuration.

If you want to take a look at the entire output, including the <think> tags, you can click here to see this .txt file.

Apart from this, I asked multiple simple coding and tech related questions and I'd say that I am very satisfied with it. It performs surprisingly well for its size.

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