o3 vs Qwen3.5-397B-A17B

o3

OpenAI

OpenAI o3, released by OpenAI in April 2025, is a large reasoning model that applies extended chain-of-thought processing to deliver improved performance on complex math, science, and coding tasks. It features a 200K token context window and native image understanding, with demonstrated strong results on mathematics and software engineering benchmarks. o3 targets demanding analytical and engineering tasks where deliberate, multi-step reasoning produces significantly better outcomes 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.