MiniMax M2.1 vs Qwen3.5-397B-A17B

MiniMax

MiniMax M2.1, released by MiniMax on December 23, 2025, is a large language model with approximately 230 billion parameters featuring strong multi-language programming capabilities and an industry-leading multilingual coding profile. It features a 196K token context window and is optimized for complex real-world software engineering tasks across Rust, Java, Golang, C++, TypeScript, and other languages. M2.1 targets agentic coding workflows and applications requiring production-grade programming across diverse language environments.

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.