Should we plead opensource labs to still produce great non thinking (instruct) models?

Reddit r/LocalLLaMA 10/02/26, 06:10 PM News

Summary

A community discussion argues that newer open-source models are degrading in non-thinking/instruct mode compared to older releases like Claude 3.6 versus 3.8, and asks labs to keep prioritizing strong instruct performance alongside reasoning capabilities.

The results are in, no thinking / instruct mode for new models degrade performance more than on old models such as 3.6 vs 3.8, where 3.6 takes the lead on several coding benches in instruct mode. I would ask the labs to still nicely focus on instruct mode also still, there a probably gains to be had without the lengthy reasoning still, some of us still use models for everything and they do not need long reasoning traces. Agentic is fine and all but to start SACRIFICING performance for the "base" model which we are used to from early Llama days is not a good direction imo.

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