Qwen2.5 14B Instruct vs Qwen3.5-397B-A17B

Alibaba / Qwen

Qwen2.5-14B-Instruct is a 14-billion-parameter language model from Alibaba released in September 2024 within the Qwen2.5 family, occupying the mid-tier of the series between efficiency-focused small models and the high-capability 72B flagship. Trained on 18 trillion tokens with emphasis on instruction alignment, code understanding, and multilingual reasoning, it offers a strong performance-to-compute ratio for developers who need more capability than 7B but cannot serve 32B or larger models. The model supports 128K context windows and structured output generation out of the box.

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.