Llama 4 Behemoth vs Qwen3.5-397B-A17B

Llama 4 Behemoth

Meta AI

Llama 4 Behemoth is a research-scale Mixture-of-Experts language model with approximately 2 trillion total parameters (288 billion active per inference), developed by Meta as a teacher model for the Llama 4 family. Available only in limited preview, it serves as the knowledge distillation source for Llama 4 Scout and Maverick. Behemoth targets research applications requiring the largest-scale open-weight model architecture from the Llama 4 generation.

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.