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Public story · 2026-08-31 · high
A Reddit demo squeezed Qwen3.8-Flash-Next onto a $400-500 Android handset with 12GB of RAM by offloading most of the model to storage.
Why now: Posted to r/LocalLLaMA on August 31, 2026.
Someone ran Qwen3.8-Flash-Next, an 80GB model, on a mid-range Android phone with just 12GB of RAM. The video post shows it generating text at 3.5 tokens a second, slow enough to watch each word land but fast enough to prove the thing runs at all.
The top comment flags the real cost: the CPU reached 80C running this. That's not a number you build a product around. It's a number you stop a demo at before something throttles or degrades.
The trick is the same one that makes Flash-Next usable on constrained desktops, sparse mixture-of-experts routing plus offloading. The phone only has to hold and compute a fraction of those 80GB at any moment. The post adds aggressive quantization on the dense part and unspecified extra optimizations on top, though it doesn't say what those are.
A 12GB phone holding an 80GB model at all means the routing and offload math scale down further than a lot of people assumed. Whether it scales down to something you'd run during an actual phone call is a separate question, and this demo doesn't answer it. Nobody's shipping a chat app on this setup at 80C.
Each link below shares sources, entities, or timing with this story.
Google supports Android / Shared entities / Same source domain / Shared topic / Earlier coverage
Linked by a graph relationship (Google supports Android); both cover Android, LocalLLaMA, MoE, Someone; reported by the same outlet (reddit.com).
Google supports Android / Shared entities / Same source domain / Earlier coverage
Linked by a graph relationship (Google supports Android); both cover Flash, Qwen3, Same; reported by the same outlet (reddit.com).
Linked by a graph relationship (Google supports Android); both cover LocalLLaMA, MoE, Someone; reported by the same outlet (reddit.com).
Linked by a graph relationship (Google supports Android); both cover LocalLLaMA, MoE, Qwen3; reported by the same outlet (reddit.com).
Claude Code supports Android / Shared entities / Same source domain / Shared topic / Earlier coverage / Tension
Linked by a graph relationship (Claude Code supports Android); both cover LocalLLaMA, MoE, Qwen3; reported by the same outlet (reddit.com).
Google supports Android / Shared entities / Earlier coverage
Linked by a graph relationship (Google supports Android); both cover Flash, MoE; earlier Flash coverage from 2026-08-16.
Linked by a graph relationship (Google supports Android); both cover Same, Someone; earlier Same coverage from 2026-08-18.
Linked by a graph relationship (Google supports Android); both cover Flash, Same; earlier Flash coverage from 2026-06-05.