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

GPT-5 Mini

OpenAI

GPT-5 mini, released by OpenAI in August 2025, is a smaller variant from the GPT-5 family that inherits GPT-5's unified reasoning architecture and multimodal capabilities at a reduced inference cost. It targets high-volume production use cases requiring a balance of intelligence and response speed, offering GPT-5 capabilities for applications where full GPT-5 inference costs are a concern.

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.