GPT-5.5 Instant vs Qwen 3
Pricing, benchmarks, and use case comparison
Quick take
- •GPT-5.5 Instant is meaningfully stronger at multimodal (82 vs 30 on our capability index).
- •Qwen 3 is meaningfully stronger at cost efficiency (90 vs 70).
- •Qwen 3 is open-weights (free to self-host); GPT-5.5 Instant is paid API only.
- •GPT-5.5 Instant has a 1050000 context window vs 128K tokens (32K for 0.6B/1.7B/4B dense variants) - better for whole-repo or long-document work.
Specs comparison
| GPT-5.5 Instant | Qwen 3 | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | OpenAI | Alibaba (Qwen Team) |
| Type | Closed source | Open source |
| Context window | ✓1050000 | 128K tokens (32K for 0.6B/1.7B/4B dense variants) |
| Input / 1M tokens | 5.00 | ✓Free (self-host) |
| Output / 1M tokens | 30.00 | Free (self-host) |
| Release date | 2026-05 | 2025-04 |
Benchmarks
| Benchmark | GPT-5.5 Instant | Qwen 3 |
|---|---|---|
| AIME 2025 | 81.2 | - |
| Terminal-Bench 2.0 | 82.7 | - |
| FrontierMath Tier 1–3 | 51.7 | - |
| Qwen3-235B-A22B | - | 235B total / 22B active |
| Qwen3-30B-A3B | - | 30B total / 3B active |
Scores sourced from official provider release posts and independent benchmark aggregators.
Which should you choose?
Choose GPT-5.5 Instant if...
- →Interactive chat and everyday assistant tasks where responsiveness matters most
- →High-volume, latency-sensitive workloads that do not need deep reasoning
- →General questions, drafting, and summarization at speed
Choose Qwen 3 if...
- →You need an open, self-hostable model with a permissive license
- →You want to toggle deep reasoning on or off per request
- →Multilingual applications
- →Efficient inference via MoE with few active parameters