Grok 4 vs Qwen3.5 397B A17B

Grok 4, released by xAI on July 9, 2025, is the fourth-generation model in the Grok family and the most advanced to date. It is multimodal, supporting text, vision, tool use, and real-time web search, with a reported 256,000-token context window for long-form reasoning and document analysis. Its training data extends through November 2024, making it the most up-to-date Grok model at launch.

The lineup includes Grok 4 Generalist for broad tasks, Grok 4 Heavy for higher-capacity reasoning, and Grok 4 Code optimized for programming and debugging. A notable feature is its always-on “Think” mode, designed for deeper multi-step reasoning. While xAI has not disclosed parameter counts, Grok 4 is positioned to compete with frontier models like GPT-5 and Claude 4, balancing real-time knowledge via web integration with structured tool use. It is best suited for coding, complex reasoning, and multimodal AI assistants.

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.