o1 vs Qwen3.5-397B-A17B

o1

OpenAI

OpenAI o1, released by OpenAI in December 2024, is a reasoning-focused large language model that applies extended chain-of-thought processing before generating responses. It features a 200K token context window and native image understanding, demonstrating strong performance on STEM benchmarks requiring multi-step reasoning. o1 targets mathematics, science, and coding tasks where careful deliberation over the problem produces more accurate outputs than direct generation.

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.