GPT-4.1 nano vs Qwen2.5 32B Instruct

GPT-4.1 nano

OpenAI

GPT-4.1 nano is OpenAI's smallest member of the GPT-4.1 family, released in April 2025 alongside GPT-4.1 and GPT-4.1 mini as the latency-optimized, cost-minimized option for high-throughput applications. Positioned below GPT-4.1 mini in both size and cost, it was designed for use cases where speed and affordability dominate over raw capability — including tool calling, intent classification, short-form instruction following, and retrieval-augmented lookup tasks. Unlike its larger siblings, it supports fine-tuning, making it a practical candidate for task-specific customization at scale without incurring the cost of fine-tuning larger models.

Alibaba / Qwen

Qwen2.5-32B-Instruct is a 32-billion-parameter open-weight model from Alibaba's Qwen team, released in September 2024 as part of the Qwen2.5 series trained on 18 trillion tokens. The model is positioned as a high-capability option for developers with access to multi-GPU setups or high-VRAM hardware, offering strong performance on coding, structured reasoning, and multilingual tasks while remaining fully open under Apache 2.0. Its 128K context window and support for structured output generation made it a popular choice for document processing and agentic workflows in the open-source community.