An In-Depth Look at Alibaba’s Qwen 3.5
The Rise of Native Multimodal Agents: An In-Depth Look at Alibaba’s Qwen 3.5 The global landscape of artificial intelligence has reached a new milestone with the release of Qwen 3.5 , the latest flagship model series from Alibaba Group. Unveiled on the eve of the 2026 Chinese New Year, Qwen 3.5 represents a strategic shift from traditional large language models toward native multimodal agents . By integrating advanced reasoning, coding proficiency, and autonomous agentic capabilities into a single, highly efficient architecture, Alibaba aims to challenge the dominance of Western frontier models such as OpenAI’s GPT-5.2 and Anthropic’s Claude 4.5 Opus. Architectural Innovation: Power Meets Efficiency At the core of Qwen 3.5 lies a sophisticated hybrid architecture that balances massive scale with remarkable inference efficiency. The first model in the series, Qwen3.5-397B-A17B , utilizes a combination of Gated Delta Networks (linear attention) and a Sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE...