Qwen2-VL-72B-Instruct vs Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Thinking
Comparing Qwen2-VL-72B-Instruct and Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Thinking across benchmarks, pricing, and capabilities.
Alibaba Cloud / Qwen Team · Alibaba Cloud / Qwen Team · Updated for 2026
Which is better?
Qwen2-VL-72B-Instruct and Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Thinking trade strengths across price, capabilities, and technical limits. The better choice depends on the workload.
Based on current benchmark, 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-Thinking
- you want the most recent training data — it shipped Sep 2025
At a glance
The differences that matter most.
Performance Benchmarks
Comparative analysis across standard metrics
Qwen2-VL-72B-Instruct and Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Thinkingdon't have any common benchmark datasets to compare. They may have been evaluated on different testing suites.
Arena Performance
Playground indexes and blind preference scores
Model Size
Parameter count comparison
Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Thinking has 6.6B more parameters than Qwen2-VL-72B-Instruct, making it 9.0% larger.
Context Window
Maximum input and output token capacity
Only Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Thinking specifies input context (65,536 tokens). Only Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Thinking specifies output context (65,536 tokens).
Input Capabilities
Supported data types and modalities
Qwen2-VL-72B-Instruct supports multimodal inputs, whereas Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Thinking 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
Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Thinking
License
Usage and distribution terms
Qwen2-VL-72B-Instruct is licensed under tongyi-qianwen, while Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Thinking uses Apache 2.0.
License differences may affect how you can use these models in commercial or open-source projects.
tongyi-qianwen
Open weights
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-Thinking was released on 2025-09-10.
Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Thinking is 13 months newer than Qwen2-VL-72B-Instruct.
Aug 29, 2024
2.0 years ago
Sep 10, 2025
11 months ago
1.0yr newerKnowledge Cutoff
When training data ends
Qwen2-VL-72B-Instruct has a documented knowledge cutoff of 2023-06-30, while Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Thinking'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-Thinking's cutoff date.
Jun 2023
—
Outputs Comparison
Judge for yourself.
Run your own prompts against Qwen2-VL-72B-Instruct and Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Thinking side-by-side, then vote on the output you prefer.
FAQ
Common questions about Qwen2-VL-72B-Instruct vs Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Thinking.