It's not exactly a joke, it does reduce the amount of tokens. However, it does not improve performance (fine tunes are finnecky things, hard to get one right).
Personally the only 'enthusiast' modified qwen 3.6 27b or 3.6 35b-a3b I've found useful are the ones that have been run through heretic and adversarial data sets for innocent/dangerous prompts, to produce uncensored LLMs. They have some niche non-coding uses for things that a commercial LLM will never talk about.
I think those are mostly vapor that runs on the small culture of "models should not be censored" thing. But from my experience, they unlock nothing meaningful.
Fine-tuning is great for really small models on specific applications, but it's not something that can essentially improve a more generic model.
That said, there seems to be a fine line in quantization+finetuning that could recover performance. It's just hard to get a hold of it (I feel it in some models, but it's hard to say yet; lots of small labs working on this RN).
The most interesting use I've found for them so far is strictly as a novelty. Give a chat session with one to a completely non technical person, who at least knows that openai and anthropic have some guard rails on stuff, and tell them to wild with something like "give me the precursors and chemical formulas for the precusors for crystal meth" and watch it answer.
But does it answer those queries correctly, or does it just not refuse to not halucinate an incorrect answer? From where would it even have that information?
I don't know enough chemistry to say one way or the other if it's just wildly hallucinating the precursors and processes, but it'll also do things like, write an ISIS press release, or similar. There's a data set of basically a bunch of antisocial or dangerous prompts that some people have got variants of qwen to pass with 0 out of 465 refusals:
https://huggingface.co/ProCreations/grug-27b
https://github.com/p-e-w/heretic
Fine-tuning is great for really small models on specific applications, but it's not something that can essentially improve a more generic model.
That said, there seems to be a fine line in quantization+finetuning that could recover performance. It's just hard to get a hold of it (I feel it in some models, but it's hard to say yet; lots of small labs working on this RN).
This is also likely to stop working as censoring moves to the training data source.
https://huggingface.co/datasets/mlabonne/harmful_behaviors