Mistral Small 3.1 24B Instruct vs Qwen3.5-397B-A17B

Mistral Small 3.1 24B Instruct

Mistral AI

Mistral Small 3.1 is a 24-billion-parameter multimodal model from Mistral AI, released in March 2025 as an update to Mistral Small 3 that added vision understanding and expanded the context window from 32K to 128K tokens. The model accepts both text and image inputs, broadening its applicability to document analysis, image-grounded reasoning, and mixed-media workflows without requiring an increase in parameter count. Released under Apache 2.0, it continued Mistral's pattern of incremental capability gains delivered in compact, practically deployable open-weight packages.

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.