GPT-OSS-120B vs Qwen3.5-397B-A17B

GPT-OSS-120B

OpenAI

GPT-OSS-120B, released by OpenAI in August 2025, is an open-weight large language model with 120 billion parameters distributed under the Apache 2.0 license. It represents OpenAI's entry into the open-source model space, enabling developers to self-host and fine-tune a GPT-5-generation-class model. GPT-OSS-120B targets research applications, on-premises deployments, and custom fine-tuning workflows requiring a large open-weight base model.

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.