Minimax M 2.5 vs Qwen3.5-397B-A17B

MiniMax

MiniMax M2.5 is a large language model from MiniMax extensively trained with reinforcement learning across hundreds of thousands of complex real-world environments. It targets agentic tool use, coding automation, and office productivity tasks, with strong results on software engineering and web browsing benchmarks. M2.5 represents the next generation of MiniMax's M-series models optimized for production agentic workloads.

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.