GPT-4.1 mini vs Qwen3-VL Flash

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-VL Flash is a lightweight multimodal variant from Alibaba's Qwen3-VL family, designed for efficient visual reasoning and image understanding at lower inference cost. It inherits the joint visual-textual architecture of the Qwen3-VL series and targets latency-sensitive applications requiring multimodal input processing at scale.