Grok 4.1 Fast vs Qwen3.5-397B-A17B

Grok 4.1 Fast

xAI

Grok 4.1 Fast, released by xAI in November 2025, is a fast-response variant from the Grok 4 family featuring a 2M token context window designed for high-throughput applications. It omits thinking tokens for immediate responses, reducing latency while maintaining strong output quality. Grok 4.1 Fast targets production APIs, real-time assistants, and cost-sensitive applications requiring long-context understanding at high volume.

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.