The Known Good Updated 8 Oct 2026 Subscribe
OpenAI: GPT-4.1 vs Qwen: Qwen3.6 35B A3B ·OpenAI vs Alibaba

OpenAI: GPT-4.1 vs Qwen: Qwen3.6 35B A3B — head-to-head comparison

OpenAI: GPT-4.1 profile Qwen: Qwen3.6 35B A3B profile All comparisons
OpenAI: GPT-4.1 — OpenAI
Quality
#50 of 65
46based on 5 of 7 evaluations
Known Good Index
Speed
#78 of 356
100.9
Output tokens per second
Price
#396 of 504
$3.50
Blended per 1M tokens
In $2.00 · Out $8.00
Cache hit price
#357 of 384
$0.50
per 1M tokens (−75%)
Context
#127 of 550
1.05M
tokens (~1,600 pages)
Qwen: Qwen3.6 35B A3B — Alibaba
Quality
#37 of 65
66based on 3 of 7 evaluations
Known Good Index
Speed
#106 of 356
87.7
Output tokens per second
Price
#147 of 504
$0.36
Blended per 1M tokens
In $0.15 · Out $1.00
Cache hit price
#143 of 384
$0.050
per 1M tokens (−67%)
Context
#250 of 550
262k
tokens (~400 pages)
Summary

On the Known Good Index, OpenAI: GPT-4.1 scores 46 and Qwen: Qwen3.6 35B A3B scores 66 — a 20-point lead for Qwen: Qwen3.6 35B A3B. They share 2 published evaluations, with OpenAI: GPT-4.1 ahead on 0 and Qwen: Qwen3.6 35B A3B ahead on 2.

Blended pricing is $3.50 per 1M tokens for OpenAI: GPT-4.1 and $0.36 for Qwen: Qwen3.6 35B A3B — Qwen: Qwen3.6 35B A3B is about 9.7× cheaper.

Throughput is 101 tokens per second for OpenAI: GPT-4.1 and 88 for Qwen: Qwen3.6 35B A3B, with time to first token at 1.0s and 1.9s. OpenAI: GPT-4.1 accepts 1.05M tokens of context against 262k.

OpenAI: GPT-4.1 is proprietary; Qwen: Qwen3.6 35B A3B is open weights under Open weights (unrestricted). 14 tracked hosts serve one or both.

Generated from tracked data on 8 Oct 2026 · how these comparisons are computed →

At a glance
MetricOpenAI: GPT-4.1Qwen: Qwen3.6 35B A3B
Known Good Index 46 based on 5 of 7 evaluations 66 based on 3 of 7 evaluations
Blended $/1M $3.50 $0.36
Output tok/s 101 88
Context window 1.05M 262k
Providers 2 12
Jump to section

Quality

Known Good Index and the capability indices, side by side

Index scores

Each index is min-max normalised across tracked models and scaled 0–100 from published evaluations. We do not run these evaluations.

MetricOpenAI: GPT-4.1Qwen: Qwen3.6 35B A3B
Known Good Index 46 66
Mathematics Index 61 —
Reasoning Index 36 —
Openness Index 5 60
The Known Good

Quality Breakdown

Every evaluation both models report a published score for

Evaluations both models report

Bar = OpenAI: GPT-4.1 · marker = Qwen: Qwen3.6 35B A3B · scores ingested from Epoch AI (CC-BY 4.0)

GPQA Diamond67 / 84
Mock AIME 2024–2538 / 87

Right-hand figures read OpenAI: GPT-4.1 / Qwen: Qwen3.6 35B A3B. OpenAI: GPT-4.1 leads on 0 of 2, Qwen: Qwen3.6 35B A3B on 2.

The Known Good

Arena Elo

Human preference rating from blind pairwise votes

Arena ratings

Elo from blind pairwise votes, ingested from Arena. Higher is better.

Neither model currently appears in an arena we ingest.

The Known Good

Price & Cost

Published API pricing by token type

Published pricing

USD per 1M tokens. Blended is a 3:1 input:output mix. Live from OpenRouter, cross-checked against models.dev. Lower is better.

MetricOpenAI: GPT-4.1Qwen: Qwen3.6 35B A3B
Input $/1M $2.00 $0.15
Output $/1M $8.00 $1.00
Blended $/1M $3.50 $0.36
Cache read $/1M $0.500 $0.050
The Known Good
We publish blended price rather than cost-per-task. Cost-per-task requires token counts from an evaluation suite we do not run. Blended price is computed from published rates and is fully reproducible — see the pricing methodology.

Context Window

Maximum input accepted and maximum output emitted

Context and output limits

Provider-declared limits, from metadata via models.dev and OpenRouter. Higher is better.

MetricOpenAI: GPT-4.1Qwen: Qwen3.6 35B A3B
Context window 1.05M 262k
Max output tokens 33k 236k
The Known Good

Speed & Latency

Mean throughput and time to first token across hosting providers, over successful measurements from the last 48 hours

Throughput and latency

Means across all tracked providers over successful measurements from the last 48 hours, derived from OpenRouter endpoint telemetry.

MetricOpenAI: GPT-4.1Qwen: Qwen3.6 35B A3B
Output tokens/s 101 88
Time to first token 1.0s 1.9s
The Known Good

Providers

Which hosts serve each model, and at what price and speed

14 hosts
Full provider benchmarks →
Provider OpenAI: GPT-4.1 blendedOpenAI: GPT-4.1 tok/s Qwen: Qwen3.6 35B A3B blendedQwen: Qwen3.6 35B A3B tok/s
OpenAI · first party $3.50 89 — —
Azure · first party $3.50 60 — —
AtlasCloud — — $0.42 140
Io Net — — $0.47 120
CoreWeave — — $0.50 109
Reka · first party — — $0.33 107
Darkbloom — — $0.21 63
SiliconFlow — — $0.63 58
Venice — — $0.33 58
Parasail — — $0.36 55
DekaLLM — — $0.33 37
AkashML — — $0.30 36
DeepInfra — — $0.31 15
Phala — — $0.47 13

Per-host pricing and telemetry from OpenRouter. A dash means that host does not serve that model.

The Known Good
Sources for this page
Pricing & providers — OpenRouter Metadata — models.dev Benchmarks — Epoch AI (CC-BY 4.0) Full attribution →