Qwen 3.5: Alibaba's 397B Model That Only Fires 17B Neurons — And Claims to Beat GPT-5.2
Alibaba just dropped a model with 397 billion parameters that only uses 17 billion of them. And it might be the most important AI release of 2026 so far. Qwen 3.5 landed on the eve of Chinese New Year — 60% cheaper to run than its predecessor, 8x faster at decoding, and supposedly beating GPT-5.2, Claude Opus 4.5, and Gemini 3 Pro on multiple benchmarks. Bold claims. But even if you discount the scoreboard, the engineering underneath tells a story worth paying attention to. ...