Originally published on AI Tech Connect.
What you need to know Three models, one shelf. Qwen3.8-27B, NVIDIA's Nemotron 3.5 Lightning and Meta's Muse Glimmer 30B all landed within three weeks in August 2026, all in the size class that fits a single 24–32GB machine. Same size, almost nothing else in common. Dense versus sparse, 131K context versus 1M, 256K of context versus 131K on two models that both ship a vision encoder. The parameter count is the least informative thing about them. Only one is built for a 24GB card without compromise. Muse Glimmer's short context and small KV cache are a design choice, not a limitation to work around. Every headline benchmark is vendor-reported. Three vendors, three harnesses, one model with no published scores at all — and one figure that is not a standard benchmark. The choice is a workload…
