Qwen3 35B MoE Distilled from Claude Opus Released Free as Quantized GGUF

Qwen3 35B MoE Distilled from Claude Opus Released Free as Quantized GGUF

A Qwen3 35B Mixture-of-Experts model distilled from Claude Opus has been released as a free quantized GGUF for local inference. The model had accumulated approximately 9,400 downloads at the time of the AlphaSignal digest on April 28. Distillation from a frontier model gives the weights near-frontier reasoning quality at a fraction of the serving cost, making it one of the most capable free weights currently available for local deployment.

Why It Matters

Frontier model distillation into free quantized weights is compressing the quality gap between cloud API inference and local models faster than expected. A Claude Opus-distilled 35B MoE running locally challenges the economic case for cloud inference on all but the most demanding tasks.