GPT-4o vs Qwen3.5-397B-A17B

GPT-4o

OpenAI

GPT-4o, released by OpenAI in May 2024, is a multimodal large language model from the GPT-4 family that natively processes text, image, and audio inputs in a single end-to-end model. It features a 128K token context window and demonstrated competitive performance across coding, reasoning, and vision benchmarks at its release. GPT-4o targets general-purpose assistant applications, vision-enabled workflows, and use cases requiring low-latency multimodal understanding.

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.