Qwen3-VL-235B-A22B vs Step-3.5-Flash

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.

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.