Devstral-2-123B vs Qwen2 72B Instruct

Devstral-2-123B

Mistral AI

Devstral 2, released by Mistral AI on December 9, 2025, is a 123 billion parameter dense transformer model specifically designed for software engineering tasks. It features a 256K token context window and achieved 72.2% on SWE-bench Verified at release, making it a competitive open-weight option for automated coding and agentic development. Devstral 2 targets code generation, multi-file software engineering, and agentic development workflows under a modified MIT license.

Alibaba / Qwen

Qwen2-72B-Instruct is a 72-billion-parameter language model released by Alibaba's Qwen team in June 2024, serving as the flagship of the Qwen2 generation and representing a major step in open-weight multilingual modeling. Trained on data spanning 30+ languages with strong coverage of code and structured reasoning, the model was among the first openly released 70B-class models to demonstrate competitive performance across diverse benchmarks. It established the foundation architecture and training methodology that the Qwen2.5 series would later extend.