GPT-5.1 Codex vs Qwen3.5-397B-A17B

GPT-5.1 Codex

OpenAI

GPT-5.1 Codex, released by OpenAI in November 2025, is a coding-specialized model from the GPT-5.1 family engineered for software engineering tasks including code generation, multi-file editing, and agentic development. It targets developers and automated coding pipelines requiring a GPT-5.1-generation model tuned for programming.

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.