Qwen2.5-Coder 7B Instruct vs Qwen3.5-397B-A17B

Alibaba / Qwen

Qwen2.5-Coder-7B-Instruct is a 7-billion-parameter code-specialized model from Alibaba, released in November 2024 as part of the Qwen2.5-Coder family, trained on a curated corpus spanning 92 programming languages with emphasis on code generation, debugging, and fill-in-the-middle completion. Built on the Qwen2.5 architecture, it extends the base series' improvements in instruction-following and long-context handling to coding-specific tasks within a compact deployable footprint. It became popular for integration into IDE extensions, CI pipelines, and self-hosted code assistant tools.

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.