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Qwen2-VL-72B-Instruct vs Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Instruct

Qwen2-VL-72B-Instruct and Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Instruct are closely matched at 14.5 and 20.3 on the LLM Stats Score.

Alibaba Cloud / Qwen Team · Alibaba Cloud / Qwen Team · Updated for 2026

Which is better?

Qwen2-VL-72B-Instruct and Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Instruct are closely matched on the overall LLM Stats Score at 14.5 and 20.3.

Based on current LLM Stats indexes, shared benchmarks, pricing, and model metadata for 2026.

Choose Qwen2-VL-72B-Instruct

  • you are already invested in the Alibaba Cloud / Qwen Team ecosystem

Choose Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Instruct

  • you want the most recent training data — it shipped Sep 2025

At a glance

The differences that matter most.

Qwen2-VL-72B-Instruct
Alibaba Cloud / Qwen Team
Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Instruct
Alibaba Cloud / Qwen Team
Core performance indexes
LLM Stats Score
14.5
#224
20.3
#186
Reasoning
11.9
#238
20.1
#181
Cost, coverage & limits
Benchmark wins
—
—
Input price
— / M
$0.15 / M
Output price
— / M
$1.50 / M
Context window
—
65,536

Individual benchmarks

15 reported for Qwen2-VL-72B-Instruct · 24 for Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Instruct

No common benchmarks found

Qwen2-VL-72B-Instruct and Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Instructdon't have any common benchmark datasets to compare. They may have been evaluated on different testing suites.

Human preference

Blind head-to-head votes and playground preference scores

Model Size

Parameter count comparison

6.6B diff

Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Instruct has 6.6B more parameters than Qwen2-VL-72B-Instruct, making it 9.0% larger.

Alibaba Cloud / Qwen Team
Qwen2-VL-72B-Instruct
73.4Bparameters
Alibaba Cloud / Qwen Team
Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Instruct
80.0Bparameters
73.4B
Qwen2-VL-72B-Instruct
80.0B
Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Instruct

Context Window

Maximum input and output token capacity

Only Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Instruct specifies input context (65,536 tokens). Only Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Instruct specifies output context (65,536 tokens).

Alibaba Cloud / Qwen Team
Qwen2-VL-72B-Instruct
Input- tokens
Output- tokens
Alibaba Cloud / Qwen Team
Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Instruct
Input65,536 tokens
Output65,536 tokens
Fri Sep 04 2026 • llm-stats.com

Input capabilities

Documented input modalities across available providers

Qwen2-VL-72B-Instruct supports multimodal inputs, whereas Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Instruct does not.

Qwen2-VL-72B-Instruct can handle both text and other forms of data like images, making it suitable for multimodal applications.

Qwen2-VL-72B-Instruct

Text
Images
Audio
Video

Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Instruct

Text
Images
Audio
Video

License

Usage and distribution terms

Qwen2-VL-72B-Instruct is licensed under tongyi-qianwen, while Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Instruct uses Apache 2.0.

License differences may affect how you can use these models in commercial or open-source projects.

Qwen2-VL-72B-Instruct

tongyi-qianwen

Open weights

Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Instruct

Apache 2.0

Open weights

Release Timeline

When each model was launched

Qwen2-VL-72B-Instruct was released on 2024-08-29, while Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Instruct was released on 2025-09-10.

Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Instruct is 13 months newer than Qwen2-VL-72B-Instruct.

Qwen2-VL-72B-Instruct

Aug 29, 2024

2.0 years ago

Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Instruct

Sep 10, 2025

11 months ago

1.0yr newer

Knowledge Cutoff

When training data ends

Qwen2-VL-72B-Instruct has a documented knowledge cutoff of 2023-06-30, while Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Instruct's cutoff date is not specified.

We can confirm Qwen2-VL-72B-Instruct's training data extends to 2023-06-30, but cannot make a direct comparison without Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Instruct's cutoff date.

Qwen2-VL-72B-Instruct

Jun 2023

Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Instruct

—

Outputs Comparison

Notice missing or incorrect data?Start an Issue discussion→

Judge for yourself.

Run your own prompts against Qwen2-VL-72B-Instruct and Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Instruct side-by-side, then vote on the output you prefer.

Qwen2-VL-72B-Instruct
✓ Preferred
Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Instruct
Open in Playground

FAQ

Common questions about Qwen2-VL-72B-Instruct vs Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Instruct.

Which is better, Qwen2-VL-72B-Instruct or Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Instruct?

Qwen2-VL-72B-Instruct and Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Instruct are closely matched on the LLM Stats Score at 14.5 and 20.3. Qwen2-VL-72B-Instruct is made by Alibaba Cloud / Qwen Team and Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Instruct is made by Alibaba Cloud / Qwen Team. The best choice depends on your use case — compare their capability indexes, individual benchmarks, pricing, and limits above.

How does Qwen2-VL-72B-Instruct compare to Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Instruct in benchmarks?

Qwen2-VL-72B-Instruct scores DocVQAtest: 96.5%, VCR_en_easy: 91.9%, ChartQA: 88.3%, OCRBench: 87.7%, MMBench: 86.5%. Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Instruct scores MMLU-Redux: 90.9%, MultiPL-E: 87.8%, IFEval: 87.6%, WritingBench: 87.3%, Creative Writing v3: 85.3%.

What are the context window sizes for Qwen2-VL-72B-Instruct and Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Instruct?

Qwen2-VL-72B-Instruct supports an unknown number of tokens and Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Instruct supports 66K tokens. A larger context window lets you process longer documents, conversations, or codebases in a single request.

What are the main differences between Qwen2-VL-72B-Instruct and Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Instruct?

Key differences include LLM Stats Score (14.5 vs 20.3), multimodal support (yes vs no), licensing (tongyi-qianwen vs Apache 2.0). See the full comparison above for benchmark-by-benchmark results.

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