DeepSeek-V3.1 vs Qwen3.5-397B-A17B

DeepSeek-V3.1

DeepSeek

DeepSeek-V3.1, released by DeepSeek in August 2025, is a hybrid large language model with 671 billion total parameters (37 billion active) that unifies the capabilities of DeepSeek-V3 and DeepSeek-R1 in a single model. It features a 128K token context window and supports both direct generation and extended reasoning modes selectable via the chat template. DeepSeek-V3.1 targets general-purpose tasks, coding, and complex reasoning under an open MIT license.

Alibaba / Qwen

Qwen3.5-397B-A17B is a 397-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts model from Alibaba's Qwen team, released in February 2026 as the open-weight flagship of the Qwen3.5 series, featuring 17 billion active parameters per forward pass through a hybrid linear-attention and sparse-MoE architecture based on Gated Delta Networks. The model was co-trained on text, images, and video using early fusion, making it natively multimodal across a 262K token context window, while achieving significantly higher inference throughput than comparable dense models due to its sparse computation design. At release it was one of the most capable open-weight models publicly available, offered under Apache 2.0 and accessible through Alibaba's DashScope API as the Qwen3.5-Plus endpoint.