GPT-4.1 nano vs Qwen3-VL Flash

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 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.