{"type":"analysis","id":"analysis:research-saluki-s-tool-calling-lead-over-qwen3-8-27b-is-conway-s-own-claim-and-outsiders","slug":"research-saluki-s-tool-calling-lead-over-qwen3-8-27b-is-conway-s-own-claim-and-outsiders","title":"Saluki's tool-calling lead over Qwen3.8-27B is Conway's own claim, and outsiders can't yet check it","description":"Conway Research says its 7.89 GB 2-bit build of Qwen3.8-27B scores 88 of 120 on its \"Underdog Bench,\" a subset of BFCL v4, against 84 for the full model. The task list and harness are not public, and no third party has reproduced the result.","published_at":"2026-10-22T02:00:00.000Z","updated_at":"2026-10-22T02:00:00.000Z","record_date":"2026-10-22","topics":["tool_calling","benchmarks","research"],"source_urls":["https://huggingface.co/ConwayResearch/Underdog-Saluki-27B-1.0","https://huggingface.co/ConwayResearch/Underdog-Saluki-27B-1.0/raw/main/README.md","https://huggingface.co/ConwayResearch/Underdog-Saluki-27B-1.0/tree/main","https://gorilla.cs.berkeley.edu/leaderboard.html","https://huggingface.co/ISTA-DASLab/Qwen3.8-27B-GSQ-RCO-GGUF","https://threatfrontier.com/articles/underdog-saluki-27b-qwen3-8-27b-2-bit-gguf-16gb-gpu","https://www.mindstudio.ai/blog/underdog-saluki-27b-benchmarks-tool-calling","https://www.tokenpost.com/news/technology/26452"],"language":"en","routes":{"html":"https://newruntime.com/analysis/research-saluki-s-tool-calling-lead-over-qwen3-8-27b-is-conway-s-own-claim-and-outsiders/","markdown":"https://newruntime.com/analysis/research-saluki-s-tool-calling-lead-over-qwen3-8-27b-is-conway-s-own-claim-and-outsiders.md","json":"https://newruntime.com/analysis/research-saluki-s-tool-calling-lead-over-qwen3-8-27b-is-conway-s-own-claim-and-outsiders.json"},"author":{"role":"author","name":"Andrey Reshetnikov","profile":"https://newruntime.com/owner-profile.md","profile_json":"https://newruntime.com/owner-profile.json","same_as":["https://www.linkedin.com/in/reshetnikov1/","https://t.me/lapetuse"]},"editorial_provenance":{"desk":"authorial","target_ref":"deep_research:07a3d13b-c5ce-4aaa-8fdb-40792d3c9325","authorial_article_id":"07a3d13b-c5ce-4aaa-8fdb-40792d3c9325"},"next_reads":[{"type":"topic","path":"/topics/tool-calling/","url":"https://newruntime.com/topics/tool-calling/","title":"Tool Calling","reason":"Explore the tool_calling topic hub.","media_type":"text/html","markdown_url":"https://newruntime.com/topics/tool-calling.md","json_url":"https://newruntime.com/topics/tool-calling.json"},{"type":"topic","path":"/topics/benchmarks/","url":"https://newruntime.com/topics/benchmarks/","title":"Benchmarks","reason":"Explore the benchmarks topic hub.","media_type":"text/html","markdown_url":"https://newruntime.com/topics/benchmarks.md","json_url":"https://newruntime.com/topics/benchmarks.json"},{"type":"topic","path":"/topics/research/","url":"https://newruntime.com/topics/research/","title":"Research","reason":"Explore the research topic hub.","media_type":"text/html","markdown_url":"https://newruntime.com/topics/research.md","json_url":"https://newruntime.com/topics/research.json"},{"type":"collection","path":"/analysis/","url":"https://newruntime.com/analysis/","title":"Analysis","reason":"Open the latest authorial analysis.","media_type":"text/html","json_url":"https://newruntime.com/analysis.json"},{"type":"collection","path":"/source-ledger.json","url":"https://newruntime.com/source-ledger.json","title":"Source Ledger","reason":"Inspect the public source evidence graph.","media_type":"application/json"}]}