Qwen3-VL-235B-A22B vs Qwen3.5-397B-A17B

Alibaba / Qwen

Qwen3-VL-235B-A22B, released by Alibaba's Qwen team in September 2025, is a natively multimodal Mixture-of-Experts large language model with 235 billion total parameters and 22 billion active parameters. It features a 256K token context window (with extrapolation to 1M tokens), native support for text, image, and video input, and joint visual-textual reasoning capabilities. Qwen3-VL-235B targets complex visual reasoning, video understanding, and multimodal agentic tasks under the Apache 2.0 license.

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.