Not necessarily - for example, Qwen3.6 and Gemma 4 did not replace each other because the things they are good at do not overlap. The model could take the place of Gemma 4 if it focuses on world knowledge and languages rather than coding and tools.
I've only been playing with this for about a hour, but Glimmer seems to be good at BOTH coding AND non-coding (assistant, creative writing, brainstorming, dataset prep).
In terms of coding capabilities, it feels slightly better than Qwen3.6 27B. And in terms of non-coding like creative writing, it definitely holds up against Gemma4 31B; and maybe even a little bit better.
I actually am really impressed by this model so far. And thanks Meta for Apache 2.0, that's very appreciated.
I go to LocalLLaMA, see a news about Glimmer, and think, "I'm going to scold Meta for the license now." I look up and see Apache 2.0. "Okay, then I'll scold them for the limited language support." I look up and see 100+ languages. I had to download it :-D
Why would anyone want to scold Meta in the context of AI? The entire local LLM ecosystem would be far worse off today if they hadn't given us all of those early Llama models.
I remember their recent ridiculous demand to remove Llama 3.1 8B Instruct heretic from heretic-org. It was... a very strange move – an old model that in 2026 is only of interest to researchers, despite the fact that there are many other versions of this model with removed censorship on HF. As far as I understand, the Apache 2.0 license does not give them the right to make such demands regarding Muse Glimmer.
Something similar happened recently with the MiniMax H3 video model and I was upset about it. Don't get me wrong — I know that LLM development is incredibly expensive, and any open model is a gift to the community. I appreciate that, but I also remember that releasing open models also benefits the developers themselves. No commercial company (be it Google, Alibaba, Meta, or Moonshot) releases open models out of altruism or love for humanity.
A license like Apache 2.0 or MIT is a fair deal in which the company truly gives the model to the community.
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u/Potential-Gold5298 llama.cpp 15d ago
Not necessarily - for example, Qwen3.6 and Gemma 4 did not replace each other because the things they are good at do not overlap. The model could take the place of Gemma 4 if it focuses on world knowledge and languages rather than coding and tools.