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

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.

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.