# inference efficiency

Alibaba’s Qwen3.5 Claims Gemini‑3‑Pro Parity at a Fraction of the Cost — A Shift from Scale to Efficiency

Alibaba has open‑sourced Qwen3.5‑Plus, a 397B‑parameter multimodal model the company says matches Gemini 3 Pro’s performance while operating with only ~17B activated parameters and much lower inference costs. The model emphasises architectural efficiency, native multimodal pretraining and agent capabilities, and forms part of a flurry of Chinese model launches that shift competition from raw scale to systems and cost efficiency.