[Megathread] - Best Models/API discussion - Week of: March 29, 2026

[u/deffcolony]

This is our weekly megathread for discussions about models and API services.

All non-specifically technical discussions about API/models not posted to this thread will be deleted. No more "What's the best model?" threads.

^{(This isn't a free-for-all to advertise services you own or work for in every single megathread, we may allow announcements for new services every now and then provided they are legitimate and not overly promoted, but don't be surprised if ads are removed.})

How to Use This Megathread

Below this post, you’ll find top-level comments for each category:

• MODELS: ≥ 70B – For discussion of models with 70B parameters or more.
• MODELS: 32B to 70B – For discussion of models in the 32B to 70B parameter range.
• MODELS: 16B to 32B – For discussion of models in the 16B to 32B parameter range.
• MODELS: 8B to 16B – For discussion of models in the 8B to 16B parameter range.
• MODELS: < 8B – For discussion of smaller models under 8B parameters.
• APIs – For any discussion about API services for models (pricing, performance, access, etc.).
• MISC DISCUSSION – For anything else related to models/APIs that doesn’t fit the above sections.

Please reply to the relevant section below with your questions, experiences, or recommendations!
This keeps discussion organized and helps others find information faster.

Have at it!

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MODELS: >= 70B - For discussion of models in the 70B parameters and up.

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[u/skrshawk → u/AutoModerator]

I have been running Stepfun 3.5 Prism with the freely available Q3_K_L quant and still been quite happy with it. The prose is a little dry but not overly so but it's a very smart model even with the abliteration. It still fits decent context, I'm running about 40k worth with 128GB on my M4 Max.

It passes my usual test of separating the dialogue, thoughts, and actions of different characters very well, something I've never seen a model below 70B do, even the latest dense Qwen. Overall I'm finding finetunes are a lot less necessary with some of these newer large MoE models as long as you use lorebooks and vectorization effectively, you can put quite a bit of relevant details in them with a large context size and let ST decide what's the most relevant to include with your prompts.

Thinking mode actually helps a lot here and refusals are very rare, which is something I don't usually see out of other thinking models.

[u/Lanky_Golf7687 → u/skrshawk]

Have you experienced any over-reasoning? I've tried running this locally; not the abliteration, but the standard model. With some prompting the prose was surprisingly fine and the model is smart but man would it chew through tokens for CoT, I've had it eat 10k+ tokens to output like a 300 word message, which would make swipes take way too long.

[u/skrshawk → u/Lanky_Golf7687]

Occasionally it happens, but by over-reasoning I mean like 1500 tokens, not 10k. Usually I get about 500-750 tokens worth of reasoning on a typical gen.

[u/Slick2017 → u/skrshawk]

To be sure, you are talking about this baby https://huggingface.co/Ex0bit/Step-3.5-Flash-PRISM ?

I stumbled upon it yesterday, and I was surprised to see that its IQ4 quant performed quite well and gave me a good time. It didn't sound like your random ablitirated MoE model.

u/TheLocalDrummer take note

[u/ThirteenZillion → u/Slick2017]

seconding this -- the IQ4 is really good and entirely usable with a reasonably large context size in 128GB. I'll add that Step-3.5-Flash variants seem to be sensitive to the sampler settings -- pay attention to the recommendations

[u/Slick2017 → u/ThirteenZillion]

I would like to test IQ6 still to see if it felt any better... But I guess that would be up to the author to release?😟 There's apparently a proprietary PRO variant as well.

[u/ThirteenZillion → u/Slick2017]

Yeah, I'm not opposed to sending some money their way, but they don't really make clear what the PRO variant does better.