Qwen2.5 72B Instruct vs Qwen3-Coder-480B

Alibaba / Qwen

Qwen2.5-72B-Instruct is the flagship of Alibaba's Qwen2.5 series, a 72-billion-parameter open-weight model released in September 2024 after training on 18 trillion tokens spanning code, mathematics, and multilingual text. It offers strong generalist performance across coding, instruction-following, and structured reasoning while remaining fully open-weight under Apache 2.0 — a combination that made it a widely referenced model in open-source evaluations and community benchmarking. The 128K context window and built-in structured output support made it a common choice for document analysis and multi-step agentic pipeline development.

Alibaba / Qwen

Qwen3-Coder-480B-A35B-Instruct, released by Alibaba's Qwen team on July 22, 2025, is a Mixture-of-Experts large language model with 480 billion total parameters and 35 billion active parameters per inference, specifically designed for agentic coding tasks. It features a 256K token native context window (extendable to 1M tokens with extrapolation) and demonstrated competitive performance on agentic coding, browser automation, and tool-use benchmarks. Qwen3-Coder-480B targets automated software engineering, multi-step code agents, and open-source coding deployments under the Apache 2.0 license.