o1 mini vs Qwen3.5-397B-A17B

o1 mini

OpenAI

OpenAI o1 mini, released by OpenAI in September 2024, is a lightweight reasoning model from the o1 family optimized for efficient STEM problem-solving at lower cost and latency. It features a 128K token context window and applies chain-of-thought reasoning specifically tuned for mathematics, science, and coding tasks. o1 mini targets use cases where rapid, cost-efficient reasoning is preferred over the broader capabilities of the full o1 model.

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.