GPT-5.6 Sol vs Qwen3 VL 235B A22B Instruct

GPT-5.6 Sol is the flagship model in OpenAI's GPT-5.6 family, which also includes Terra (a balanced everyday-work tier) and Luna (a fast, cost-efficient tier). Sol is designed for demanding reasoning, long-horizon agentic workflows, software engineering, computer use, scientific research, and cybersecurity tasks. It introduces two new capability modes: a "max" reasoning effort setting that allocates additional compute time for difficult problems, and an "ultra" mode that coordinates multiple subagents in parallel to accelerate complex, multi-step work. The model supports native multimodal input, allowing it to process screenshots, diagrams, charts, documents, and photographs alongside text. A reported context window of approximately 1.5 million tokens enables processing of large codebases, lengthy research documents, and extended agentic sessions.

GPT-5.6 Sol was announced on June 26, 2026, initially in a limited preview for trusted partners, and reached general availability on July 9, 2026. On the Agents' Last Exam benchmark, which evaluates long-running professional workflows across 55 fields, Sol scores 53.6. On Terminal-Bench 2.1, which tests command-line agentic coding workflows, Sol Ultra achieves 91.9%. The model also demonstrates gains in life sciences evaluations, including long-horizon genomics and quantitative biology analyses. OpenAI paired the release with its most extensive safety evaluation to date, combining human red teaming with large-scale automated testing, and classified Sol as High capability in both cybersecurity and biological risk under its Preparedness Framework, though it does not cross the Critical threshold in either category.

Qwen3 VL 235B A22B Instruct is a flagship multimodal vision-language model developed by Qwen (Alibaba Cloud), designed for instruction-following tasks that combine advanced text generation with visual understanding. It serves as a high-end open-weight model for developers and researchers building multimodal AI systems that require strong reasoning, perception, and long-context capabilities.

The model supports interleaved text and image inputs, very long context windows (up to roughly 256K tokens), and efficient inference through a mixture-of-experts architecture with about 22B active parameters out of 235B total. In today’s landscape, it competes with top-tier proprietary vision-language models while offering the advantages of open weights and flexible deployment. Typical applications include multimodal assistants, document and image analysis, visual reasoning, and large-context instruction-based workflows.