STORY · MODELLER_
Alibaba launches Qwen3.5-397B-A17B – efficient open source model with multimodal AI
Alibaba has released Qwen3.5-397B-A17B, an open model with native multimodal support, spatial intelligence, and a hybrid linear attention + sparse MoE architecture. The model supports 201 languages, context windows of 256K tokens, and has a sparsity ratio of 4.3%, making it efficient to run locally even on Apple Silicon through quantization.
WHY IT MATTERS
This is a significant open source solution that competes directly with proprietary models from OpenAI and others, showing that Chinese AI labs are now delivering state-of-the-art with open code. It reduces barriers for research and commercial use globally.
SOURCES
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