GPT-4.1 mini vs Qwen3.5-397B-A17B

GPT-4.1 mini

OpenAI

GPT-4.1 mini, released by OpenAI in April 2025, is a smaller variant from the GPT-4.1 family designed for efficient, cost-effective deployments requiring long-context understanding. It features a 1M token context window and native image understanding, with maintained coding and instruction-following capabilities relative to its size. GPT-4.1 mini targets applications needing a balance between response speed, cost, and capability, such as production APIs with high request volumes.

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.