Qwen2 72B Instruct vs Qwen3-Max

Alibaba / Qwen

Qwen2-72B-Instruct is a 72-billion-parameter language model released by Alibaba's Qwen team in June 2024, serving as the flagship of the Qwen2 generation and representing a major step in open-weight multilingual modeling. Trained on data spanning 30+ languages with strong coverage of code and structured reasoning, the model was among the first openly released 70B-class models to demonstrate competitive performance across diverse benchmarks. It established the foundation architecture and training methodology that the Qwen2.5 series would later extend.

Alibaba / Qwen

Qwen3-Max, released by Alibaba in September 2025 as an API preview, is a large language model exceeding one trillion parameters built for complex reasoning and long-context tasks. It features a 262K token context window, hybrid thinking modes that allow switching between direct generation and extended chain-of-thought, and is available as a proprietary cloud API via Alibaba Cloud and Qwen Chat. Qwen3-Max targets demanding reasoning, multilingual analysis, and applications requiring frontier-level performance from the Qwen3 generation.