o3 mini vs Qwen2.5 72B Instruct

o3 mini

OpenAI

OpenAI o3 mini, released by OpenAI in January 2025, is a compact reasoning model from the o3 family designed for efficient, cost-effective STEM problem-solving. It features a 200K token context window and adjustable chain-of-thought effort settings, allowing developers to trade reasoning depth for speed. o3 mini targets science, mathematics, and coding applications where lower inference cost and faster response times are a priority.

Alibaba / Qwen

Qwen2.5-72B-Instruct is the flagship of Alibaba's Qwen2.5 series, a 72-billion-parameter open-weight model released in September 2024 after training on 18 trillion tokens spanning code, mathematics, and multilingual text. It offers strong generalist performance across coding, instruction-following, and structured reasoning while remaining fully open-weight under Apache 2.0 — a combination that made it a widely referenced model in open-source evaluations and community benchmarking. The 128K context window and built-in structured output support made it a common choice for document analysis and multi-step agentic pipeline development.