Qwen2.5-Omni-7B vs Step-3.5-Flash

Alibaba / Qwen

Qwen2.5-Omni-7B is a 7-billion-parameter end-to-end multimodal model from Alibaba, released in March 2025 as part of the Omni series designed to unify perception and generation across text, images, audio, and video in a single model architecture. Unlike pipeline-based multimodal systems, it processes all modalities end-to-end and can generate both text and speech outputs, targeting use cases in voice assistants, multimodal agents, and real-time interactive applications. Its compact size made it notable for on-device and resource-constrained multimodal deployments.

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.