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

GPT-5

OpenAI

GPT-5, released by OpenAI on August 7, 2025, is a large language model that combines direct generation and extended reasoning in a single unified system with a built-in routing mechanism. It features a 400K token context window, 128K maximum output tokens, native multimodal support (text, image, audio, video), and demonstrated strong results across coding, mathematics, visual understanding, and health benchmarks at release. GPT-5 targets complex multi-step tasks including advanced coding, mathematical problem solving, and long-context analysis.

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.