Grok 3 vs Qwen3.5-397B-A17B

Grok 3

xAI

Grok 3, released by xAI in February 2025, is a large language model trained on xAI's Colossus supercluster with substantially increased compute over previous generations. It features a 1M token context window, RL-enhanced Think mode for extended reasoning, and demonstrated strong results on mathematics, coding, and scientific benchmarks. Grok 3 targets complex reasoning, real-time information tasks via X platform integration, and agentic workflows via the xAI API.

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.