Gemini 3.5 Flash vs Qwen3.5 397B A17B

Gemini 3.5 Flash is a multimodal language model developed by Google DeepMind and released at Google I/O 2026. It is built on the Gemini 3 Flash reasoning foundation and introduces configurable thinking levels (minimal, low, medium, and high) that allow developers to tune the depth of internal reasoning before a response is generated. The model accepts text, image, video, audio, and PDF inputs and produces text output, with a 1 million token context window and up to 65,000 output tokens per request. It is natively multimodal, processing visual inputs alongside text to support tasks such as image captioning, classification, optical character recognition, object detection, and visual grounding, where the model references specific regions within an image or video frame.

Its vision capabilities extend to interpreting UI screenshots, diagrams, charts, and real-world scenes, as well as understanding video and live frame sequences for activity and scene recognition. The model supports combined tool use, including Google Search, URL context, code execution, and custom functions, within a single request, and it uses reasoning context from previous turns when thought signatures are present in the conversation history, enabling persistent multi-turn reasoning chains. Gemini 3.5 Flash carries a knowledge cutoff of January 2026 and is available via the Gemini API, Google AI Studio, Google Antigravity, and the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform.

Qwen3.5-397B-A17B is a 397B-parameter (17B active) open-weight multimodal model developed by Alibaba’s Qwen team, released on 2026-02-16 under Apache-2.0. It supports text and image inputs with text outputs, combining a sparse Mixture-of-Experts architecture with Gated Delta Networks for efficient scaling. The model provides native vision-language reasoning and a large ~262K token context window, extendable to ~1M tokens.

As the first open-weight release in the Qwen3.5 family, it positions itself as a high-capacity, long-context alternative in the large vision-language space, balancing scale and efficiency via sparse activation. It is designed for advanced reasoning, coding, agent workflows, and multimodal understanding tasks.