Alibaba's new 397B open-weight multimodal monster
Alibaba's Qwen team just rolled out Qwen3.5-397B-A17B, the first open-weight model in the Qwen3.5 lineup. Built on a sparse MoE architecture, it carries 397 billion total parameters while activating just 17 billion per token, pushing decoding throughput up to 19x over Qwen3-Max. Why it matters: Developers get Apache 2.0-licensed multimodal agent capabilities without the prohibitive serving costs of dense giants.