GPT-4.1 vs Qwen3.5-397B-A17B

GPT-4.1

OpenAI

GPT-4.1, released by OpenAI in April 2025, is a large language model from the GPT-4 family optimized for coding, precise instruction following, and long-context tasks. It features a 1M token context window and native image understanding, with improved performance on tool-calling and web development benchmarks compared to GPT-4o. GPT-4.1 targets software development workflows, long-document analysis, and applications requiring accurate, instruction-adherent outputs.

Alibaba / Qwen

Qwen3.5-397B-A17B is a 397-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts model from Alibaba's Qwen team, released in February 2026 as the open-weight flagship of the Qwen3.5 series, featuring 17 billion active parameters per forward pass through a hybrid linear-attention and sparse-MoE architecture based on Gated Delta Networks. The model was co-trained on text, images, and video using early fusion, making it natively multimodal across a 262K token context window, while achieving significantly higher inference throughput than comparable dense models due to its sparse computation design. At release it was one of the most capable open-weight models publicly available, offered under Apache 2.0 and accessible through Alibaba's DashScope API as the Qwen3.5-Plus endpoint.