What is Active Parameters?

In Mixture of Experts models, active parameters refers to the subset of total parameters that activate for each token. According to the LLMCheck index, Qwen 3 30B-A3B has 30B total parameters but only 3B active, enabling it to run at ~58 tok/s on a 24 GB Mac — speed comparable to a 3B dense model with 30B-class reasoning quality.