Devstral-2-123B vs Qwen3.5-397B-A17B

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

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.