Comprehensive side-by-side LLM comparison
Both models show comparable benchmark performance. Both models have their strengths depending on your specific coding needs.
OpenAI
GPT-5.1 Instant, released by OpenAI in November 2025, is a low-latency variant from the GPT-5.1 family optimized for fast response times and high-throughput workloads. It targets real-time applications, conversational assistants, and production APIs where response speed is a primary requirement alongside GPT-5.1-generation reasoning quality.
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.
3 months newer

GPT-5.1 Instant
OpenAI
2025-11
Qwen3.5-397B-A17B
Alibaba / Qwen
2026-02-16
Average performance across 1 common benchmarks
GPT-5.1 Instant
Qwen3.5-397B-A17B
Performance comparison across key benchmark categories
GPT-5.1 Instant
Qwen3.5-397B-A17B
Available providers and their performance metrics
GPT-5.1 Instant
Qwen3.5-397B-A17B
GPT-5.1 Instant
Qwen3.5-397B-A17B