DeepSeek-V3.2-Speciale vs Qwen3.5-397B-A17B

DeepSeek-V3.2-Speciale

DeepSeek

DeepSeek-V3.2-Speciale is a high-compute variant of DeepSeek-V3.2 with 685 billion total parameters, made available for a limited period in December 2025. It was released without tool-calling support but demonstrated exceptional reasoning performance, achieving gold-medal results in the 2025 IMO and IOI competitions. DeepSeek-V3.2-Speciale targets research and benchmarking use cases requiring maximum reasoning capability under an 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.