Qwen2.5 32B Instruct vs Step-3.5-Flash

Alibaba / Qwen

Qwen2.5-32B-Instruct is a 32-billion-parameter open-weight model from Alibaba's Qwen team, released in September 2024 as part of the Qwen2.5 series trained on 18 trillion tokens. The model is positioned as a high-capability option for developers with access to multi-GPU setups or high-VRAM hardware, offering strong performance on coding, structured reasoning, and multilingual tasks while remaining fully open under Apache 2.0. Its 128K context window and support for structured output generation made it a popular choice for document processing and agentic workflows in the open-source community.

StepFun

Step-3.5-Flash, released by StepFun on February 2, 2026, is a Mixture-of-Experts large language model with 197 billion total parameters and approximately 11 billion active parameters per inference. It features a 256K token context window using a 3:1 sliding-window-to-full-attention ratio, processing 100–350 tokens per second. Step-3.5-Flash targets agentic tasks, coding workflows, and open-source deployments requiring frontier reasoning capabilities with efficient inference, under an Apache 2.0 license.