o4 mini vs Qwen2.5 7B Instruct

o4 mini

OpenAI

OpenAI o4 mini, released by OpenAI in April 2025, is a compact reasoning model from the o4 family that combines multimodal understanding with efficient chain-of-thought processing. It features a 200K token context window and native image understanding, with strong performance on mathematics and coding benchmarks relative to its inference cost. o4 mini targets cost-sensitive applications requiring both visual reasoning and mathematical accuracy.

Alibaba / Qwen

Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct is a 7-billion-parameter open-weight language model from Alibaba's Qwen team, released in September 2024 as part of the Qwen2.5 series trained on 18 trillion tokens with improved code, math, and multilingual coverage. The model delivers significantly stronger instruction-following, structured output generation, and long-context handling compared to its predecessor, supporting 128K context windows in a compact form factor. It became widely adopted as a foundation for fine-tuning, RAG pipelines, and on-device deployment due to its balance of capability and efficiency.