The closest alternative to Qwen3 VL 235B A22B Instruct is GPT-4o (2024-11-20) — comparable intelligence (17.3 vs 17.0); for a cheaper option, MiMo-V2.5 runs $0.140/M vs $0.200/M; for more speed, gpt-oss-120b (free) hits 554 t/s; and the best open-weight substitute is MiniMax M3.
GPT-4o (2024-11-20) is the closest alternative to Qwen3 VL 235B A22B Instruct, with an Intelligence Index of 17.3 (Qwen3 VL 235B A22B Instruct scores 17.0) at $2.50 per million input tokens.
Yes — MiMo-V2.5 costs $0.140 per million input tokens versus $0.200 for Qwen3 VL 235B A22B Instruct, while staying within ~8 points of its Intelligence Index.
MiniMax M3 is the strongest open-weight alternative to Qwen3 VL 235B A22B Instruct — downloadable from Hugging Face and self-hostable, scoring 54.7 on intelligence.