Birds Don't Fly Like Planes. Neither Does AI. (4 minute read)

# Birds Don't Fly Like Planes. Neither Does AI. Source: [https://tomtunguz.com/birds-dont-fly-like-planes-neither-does-ai](https://tomtunguz.com/birds-dont-fly-like-planes-neither-does-ai) Your laptop can now run a model as capable as nearly anything in the cloud\. I swapped Qwen3\.8\-27B into my agent & it works brilliantly\. This bird flies differently than a plane\. This little Qwen model ranks \#1 of 135 models, scoring 52 on Artificial Analysis’s Intelligence Index, a point above GLM\-5\.2, the state\-of\-the\-art open\-source model from Z\.ai, at 753b parameters\.[1](https://tomtunguz.com/birds-dont-fly-like-planes-neither-does-ai#fn:1)A laptop model beats a recognizable, frontier\-class cloud peer roughly 28 times its size\. How does a bumblebee achieve the same flight as an airliner? Bigger models can store more knowledge, so they can skip straight to an answer, like an expert in many different fields\. Smaller models don’t have as much memorized, so they must reason more, almost from first principles, to close that gap\.[2](https://tomtunguz.com/birds-dont-fly-like-planes-neither-does-ai#fn:2) I saw this firsthand when benchmarking the DeepSeek V4 cloud model against two local models\. I compared them on the same work, 25 venture\-capital tasks \(researching startups, summarizing articles, transcribing podcasts\), scored by a judge model\.[3](https://tomtunguz.com/birds-dont-fly-like-planes-neither-does-ai#fn:3) Qwen3\.8\-27B is dense : it uses every chapter in the book on every question\. Book skimmers DeepSeek & Qwen 3\.6 35b \(another local model I threw into the test\), flips only to the relevant chapters for a question\.[4](https://tomtunguz.com/birds-dont-fly-like-planes-neither-does-ai#fn:4) modelquality /9tok/savg tokensavg latency[deepseek\-v4\-flash](https://ollama.com/library/deepseek-v4-flash)\(plane\)8\.0137\.31591\.1s[qwen3\.8\-27b](https://ollama.com/library/qwen3.8:27b)\(bumblebee\)8\.051\.93697\.2s[qwen3\.6\-35b\-a3b](https://ollama.com/library/qwen3.6:35b)\(hummingbird\)7\.9113\.41,14310\.0sThese models provide identically good answers\. But the speed varies\. The local Qwen 35b shreds at top speed, but needs to think about 7\.2x more than the cloud model, crossing the line 9 seconds after DeepSeek\. The newest Qwen model is three seconds faster, & the cloud is 6 seconds faster yet\. The cloud model jumps to the right answer ; the local models contemplate & debate internally at different rates of speed & accuracy\. For example : on one triage task, the 35B spent 993 tokens to produce six words, “Classification: Scheduling / Action: Respond\.” 1000 tokens of deliberation before the response is a hummingbird’s sprint to a honeysuckle\. The bumblebee needed 369 thinking tokens, buzzing along at half the speed\. Local models can achieve the same result as cloud models, but they’ll take a different flight path to get there\.