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GPT-5 Mini vs Qwen3 VL 30B A3B Instruct

We don't benchmark GPT-5 Mini or Qwen3 VL 30B A3B Instruct on Vision Evals. GPT-5 Mini is proprietary under Proprietary: commercial use per vendor terms. Qwen3 VL 30B A3B Instruct is open-weight under Apache 2.0: free for commercial use. Qwen3 VL 30B A3B Instruct is cheaper per token ($0.15/M vs $0.25/M input). Test them side by side on your own images below.

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OpenAIGPT-5 Mini
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GPT-5 Mini vs Qwen3 VL 30B A3B Instruct Comparison Table

Pricing updated November 3, 2026

PropertyGPT-5 MiniQwen3 VL 30B A3B Instruct
OrganizationOpenAIQwen
Categoryclosedopen
Modalitymultimodalmultimodal
Release DateAug 2025Oct 2025
Context Window400K262K
ParametersUnknown31B
LicenseProprietaryApache 2.0
Commercial usecommercial use per vendor termsfree for commercial use
Pricing per 1M tokens
Input $/1M$0.250$0.150
Output $/1M$2.00$0.600
Vision Tasks
ClassificationDemoSupported
Object DetectionDemoSupported
Both support 8 more tasks
Model Features
Both support 3 more features

GPT-5 Mini vs Qwen3 VL 30B A3B Instruct: Overview

GPT-5 Mini

GPT-5 Mini, released by OpenAI on August 7, 2025, is a mid-tier variant of the GPT-5 family that balances cost, speed, and capability. It is multimodal, supporting both text and image inputs, and offers a substantial input context window of ~400,000 tokens with output lengths up to ~128,000 tokens. While less powerful than the full GPT-5, it inherits its safety tuning, instruction-following improvements, and multimodal reasoning, making it a practical choice for developers who need large context handling without the expense of premium models.

GPT-5 Mini is optimized for affordability while retaining strong reasoning performance. Benchmarks show it outperforming earlier models such as GPT-4o on many multimodal and medical VQA tasks, though it lags behind GPT-5 on the most complex problems. Ideal use cases include prototyping, scalable content generation, document analysis, and mid-range reasoning tasks where efficiency and context capacity matter more than top-tier accuracy.

Qwen3 VL 30B A3B Instruct

Qwen3 VL 30B A3B Instruct is an open-weight multimodal large language model developed by Alibaba as part of the Qwen family, built for instruction-following tasks that unify text generation with visual and video understanding. Released around October 2025 under the Apache-2.0 license, it targets efficient, high-fidelity vision-language reasoning across very long contexts.

The model accepts text and image inputs and produces text outputs, with strong performance in OCR, spatial reasoning, long-video understanding, and agentic or GUI-centric visual tasks. It uses a Mixture-of-Experts (A3B) design with ~31.1B total parameters and ~3B active per token, paired with Qwen3-VL’s unified multimodal stack (including Interleaved-MRoPE and DeepStack fusion) to process text, images, and video in a single architecture. OCR support expands to 32 languages, enhancing document workflows. With a native ~262K token context window (extendable further), it stands out today for its balance of scale, efficiency, long-context support, and open accessibility in multimodal systems.