GPT-4.1 nano vs Qwen3-Max

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

Qwen3-Max, released by Alibaba in September 2025 as an API preview, is a large language model exceeding one trillion parameters built for complex reasoning and long-context tasks. It features a 262K token context window, hybrid thinking modes that allow switching between direct generation and extended chain-of-thought, and is available as a proprietary cloud API via Alibaba Cloud and Qwen Chat. Qwen3-Max targets demanding reasoning, multilingual analysis, and applications requiring frontier-level performance from the Qwen3 generation.