'We Have a New Weight Class' — r/LocalLLaMA Identifies Small MoE (~3B Active / 35B Total) as Emerging Standard
r/LocalLLaMA·medium signal
A 175-upvote, 44-comment r/LocalLLaMA post with comparison chart identifies a new practical weight class: small Mixture-of-Experts models with ~3B active parameters but 30-35B total (Qwen 3.5 35B-A3B, FernflowerAI, etc.). Multiple model families are converging on this architecture for local deployment, suggesting it may become the default for consumer hardware just as 7B became standard in the dense-model era.