Qwen 4 vs. Qwen3.5-Plus

Qwen 4 is Alibaba’s forthcoming next-generation foundation model and the planned successor to the company’s Qwen3.x model family. Alibaba announced Qwen 4 at the 2026 Apsara Conference on September 22 and confirmed that the model is currently in training. The company has not yet disclosed Qwen 4’s architecture, parameter count, context length, training-compute requirements, benchmark scores, pricing, licensing terms, or release schedule. Qwen 4 is being developed as Alibaba expands its broader AI stack across foundation models, multimodal systems, AI infrastructure, and agent-oriented cloud services. A major research direction surrounding Alibaba’s next generation of models is recursive self-improvement based on real-world tasks and empirical feedback. The company has already experimented with this approach using Qwen3.8-Max, allowing the model to participate in automated pipeline design, data validation, experimentation, error diagnosis, and post-training optimization. Alibaba reported that Qwen3.8-Max completed 33 iterative cycles during one such experiment and increased its Artificial Analysis score from 40 to 45. In a separate chip-design experiment, a Qwen model performed more than 10,000 EDA tool calls during over 60 hours of automated improvement work, illustrating Alibaba’s interest in long-horizon agentic tasks. These demonstrations describe the research program surrounding future Qwen development rather than confirmed features of Qwen 4 itself. Alibaba has also announced a longer-term roadmap in which Qwen 4.5 and Qwen 5 models are projected to reach between 5 trillion and 10 trillion parameters. Qwen 4 therefore remains a pre-release model, with detailed capabilities and access information expected to become clearer when Alibaba publishes its formal launch materials.

Qwen3.5-Plus is a next-generation multimodal large language model built for scalable, enterprise-grade reasoning and agentic applications. It combines linear attention mechanisms with a sparse mixture-of-experts architecture to maximize inference efficiency while maintaining performance comparable to leading frontier models. The system supports text, image, and video inputs, generating high-quality text outputs suited for analysis, synthesis, and tool-augmented workflows. With a 1 million token context window and support for up to 64K output tokens, Qwen3.5-Plus enables deep, long-form reasoning across extensive documents and datasets. Its optional deep thinking mode allows for expanded chain-of-thought reasoning up to 80K tokens, making it ideal for complex analytical and multi-step problem-solving tasks. Developers can integrate structured outputs, function calling, prefix continuation, batch processing, and explicit caching to optimize both performance and cost efficiency. Built-in tool support through the Responses API includes web search, web extraction, image search, and code interpretation for dynamic multi-agent systems. High throughput limits and OpenAI-compatible API endpoints make deployment straightforward across global applications. With transparent token-based pricing and enterprise-level monitoring, Qwen3.5-Plus provides a powerful foundation for building intelligent assistants, multimodal analyzers, and scalable AI services.