Qwen3-Max vs Seed 1.5-VL

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.

ByteDance

Seed1.5-VL, released by ByteDance Seed on May 15, 2025, is a vision-language foundation model composed of a 532M-parameter vision encoder and a Mixture-of-Experts language model with 20 billion active parameters. It was pretrained on over 3 trillion multimodal tokens and achieved state-of-the-art performance on 38 out of 60 public VLM benchmarks at release. Seed1.5-VL targets complex visual reasoning, OCR, video comprehension, 3D spatial understanding, and multimodal agentic tasks.