Gemini 2.5 Flash vs Qwen3.5-397B-A17B

Gemini 2.5 Flash

Google DeepMind

Gemini 2.5 Flash, released by Google in June 2025, is a large language model from the Gemini 2.5 family optimized for high-throughput, cost-efficient deployments with multimodal reasoning. It features a 1M token context window, hybrid thinking control, and native support for text, image, video, and audio input. Gemini 2.5 Flash targets latency-sensitive applications, document analysis, and high-volume API workloads that benefit from combined reasoning and generation in a single model.

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.