Qwen3-235B-A22B vs Qwen3-Max

Alibaba / Qwen

Qwen3-235B-A22B, released by Alibaba's Qwen team on April 28, 2025, is a Mixture-of-Experts large language model with 235 billion total parameters and 22 billion active parameters per inference. It features a 256K token context window, hybrid thinking capabilities (both reasoning and direct generation modes), and was trained on 36 trillion tokens across 119 languages. Qwen3-235B targets complex reasoning, multilingual tasks, and open-source deployments under the Apache 2.0 license.

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.