GPT-4.1 nano vs Qwen3-VL-235B-A22B

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-VL-235B-A22B, released by Alibaba's Qwen team in September 2025, is a natively multimodal Mixture-of-Experts large language model with 235 billion total parameters and 22 billion active parameters. It features a 256K token context window (with extrapolation to 1M tokens), native support for text, image, and video input, and joint visual-textual reasoning capabilities. Qwen3-VL-235B targets complex visual reasoning, video understanding, and multimodal agentic tasks under the Apache 2.0 license.