Alibaba Releases Qwen 3.5 Multimodal Models
Alibaba's Qwen released two Qwen 3.5 models on Feb 15, 2026: an open-weight MoE Qwen3.5-397B-A17B and a proprietary Qwen3.5 Plus API. The open model uses a hybrid linear-attention and sparse mixture-of-experts design that activates 17 billion of 397 billion parameters for inference efficiency, with weights posted to Hugging Face (807GB) and GGUF variants available. The Plus API supports 1M-token context, search, and a code interpreter.
Scoring Rationale
Strong product relevance and accessibility, boosted by open weights and 1M context, limited by sparse benchmarking and brief coverage.
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Sources
- Read OriginalQwen3.5: Towards Native Multimodal Agentssimonwillison.net
