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

Llama 4 Maverick

Meta AI

Llama 4 Maverick, released by Meta on April 5, 2025, is a natively multimodal Mixture-of-Experts large language model with 400 billion total parameters and 17 billion active parameters per inference. It features a 1M token context window and supports text and image input, enabling strong performance on both language and vision tasks. Maverick targets open-source deployments requiring large-scale multimodal reasoning, released under Meta's custom license.

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.