Alibaba released Qwen3.5-397B-A17B, an open-weight model featuring native multimodality, spatial intelligence, and a hybrid linear attention + sparse MoE architecture supporting 201 languages and long context windows up to 256K tokens. The model shows improvements over previous versions like Qwen3-Max and Qwen3-VL, with a sparsity ratio of about 4.3%. Community discussions highlighted the Gated Delta Networks enabling efficient inference despite large model size (~800GB BF16), with successful local runs on Apple Silicon using quantization techniques.

The hosted API version, Qwen3.5-Plus, supports 1M context and integrates search and code interpreter features. This release follows other Chinese labs like Z.ai, Minimax, and Kimi in refreshing large models. The model is licensed under Apache-2.0 and is expected to be the last major release before DeepSeek v4. The news also notes Pete Steinberger joining OpenAI.