o3 mini vs Qwen3.5-397B-A17B

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

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.