Gemini 3.1 Pro vs Qwen3.5-397B-A17B

Gemini 3.1 Pro

Google DeepMind

Gemini 3.1 Pro is a multimodal language model from Google DeepMind, released in preview in February 2026 as a point-version upgrade to Gemini 3 Pro focused on improving reasoning depth, factual grounding, and coding and agentic task performance. The model accepts text, images, video, audio, and PDFs as inputs across a 1M token context window, extending the multimodal breadth of the Gemini 3 series with a companion endpoint specifically optimized for custom tool use in agentic pipelines. Google describes it as built to refine the reliability and performance of the Gemini 3 Pro series, reflecting an incremental engineering iteration rather than an architectural overhaul.

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.