Qwen2.5-VL 32B Instruct vs Qwen3.5-397B-A17B

Alibaba / Qwen

Qwen2.5-VL-32B-Instruct is a 32-billion-parameter vision-language model from Alibaba, extending the Qwen2.5 architecture with multimodal capabilities for understanding images, documents, charts, and video frames alongside text. The model was designed for tasks requiring deep visual reasoning — such as document parsing, table extraction, and spatial understanding — with performance that made it a practical choice for document intelligence and visual data analysis workflows. As an open-weight model, it became a widely adopted foundation for fine-tuning domain-specific multimodal applications.

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.