Compare LFM2.5 vs. Qwen3.5

Liquid AI's LFM2.5 represents an advanced iteration of on-device AI foundation models, engineered to provide high-efficiency and performance for AI inference on edge devices like smartphones, laptops, vehicles, IoT systems, and embedded hardware without the need for cloud computing resources. This new version builds upon the earlier LFM2 framework by greatly enhancing the scale of pretraining and the stages of reinforcement learning, resulting in a suite of hybrid models that boast around 1.2 billion parameters while effectively balancing instruction adherence, reasoning skills, and multimodal functionalities for practical applications. The LFM2.5 series comprises various models including Base (for fine-tuning and personalization), Instruct (designed for general-purpose instruction), Japanese-optimized, Vision-Language, and Audio-Language variants, all meticulously crafted for rapid on-device inference even with stringent memory limitations. These models are also made available as open-weight options, facilitating deployment through platforms such as llama.cpp, MLX, vLLM, and ONNX, thus ensuring versatility for developers. With these enhancements, LFM2.5 positions itself as a robust solution for diverse AI-driven tasks in real-world environments.

Qwen3.5 represents a major advancement in open-weight multimodal AI models, engineered to function as a native vision-language agent system. Its flagship model, Qwen3.5-397B-A17B, leverages a hybrid architecture that fuses Gated DeltaNet linear attention with a high-sparsity mixture-of-experts framework, allowing only 17 billion parameters to activate during inference for improved speed and cost efficiency. Despite its sparse activation, the full 397-billion-parameter model achieves competitive performance across reasoning, coding, multilingual benchmarks, and complex agent evaluations. The hosted Qwen3.5-Plus version supports a one-million-token context window and includes built-in tool use for search, code interpretation, and adaptive reasoning. The model significantly expands multilingual coverage to 201 languages and dialects while improving encoding efficiency with a larger vocabulary. Native multimodal training enables strong performance in image understanding, video processing, document analysis, and spatial reasoning tasks. Its infrastructure includes FP8 precision pipelines and heterogeneous parallelism to boost throughput and reduce memory consumption. Reinforcement learning at scale enhances multi-step planning and general agent behavior across text and multimodal environments. Overall, Qwen3.5 positions itself as a high-efficiency foundation for autonomous digital agents capable of reasoning, searching, coding, and interacting with complex environments.