GPT-6 Astra (Medium) vs Qwen3 235B A22B 2507 (Reasoning)

Which is better for the money: GPT-6 Astra (Medium) by OpenAI or Qwen3 235B A22B 2507 (Reasoning) by Alibaba? Intelligence, total benchmark cost, and end-to-end time from Artificial Analysis & other sources, snapshot 2026-10-27.

Trade-off

OpenAIGPT-6 Astra (Medium)Off the frontier

Intelligence: 49.60
Total cost: $2434

AlibabaQwen3 235B A22B 2507 (Reasoning)Off the frontier

Intelligence: 12.70
Total cost: $234

Verdict

Depends on your budget

GPT-6 Astra (Medium) scores 36.9 points higher (49.6 vs 12.7) but costs 10× as much to run the benchmark ($2434 vs $234; flagship vs mid-range cost classes). They are not alternatives at one budget: pick GPT-6 Astra (Medium) when you need intelligence above 12.7, and Qwen3 235B A22B 2507 (Reasoning) when 12.7 is enough.

Metric	GPT-6 Astra (Medium)	Qwen3 235B A22B 2507 (Reasoning)	Difference
Intelligence (higher is better)	49.6	12.7	−74.4% Qwen3 235B A22B 2507 … is 74.4% less intelligent
Total AA cost (lower is better)	$2,434.12	$233.56	−90.4% Qwen3 235B A22B 2507 … is 90.4% cheaper
End-to-end time (lower is better)	14.25s	22.73s	+59.5% Qwen3 235B A22B 2507 … is 59.5% slower
Price per 1M tokens (in / out)	$10.0 / $50.0	$0.23 / $2.30
Input modalities	Text, Image	Text

Qwen3 235B A22B 2507 (Reasoning) vs GPT-6 Astra (Medium): 74.4% less intelligence, 90.4% less cost to run the AA benchmark, and 59.5% slower end-to-end.

Open this matchup in the interactive picker GPT-6 Astra (Medium): what beats it Qwen3 235B A22B 2507 (Reasoning): what beats it

Today's Pareto frontier

Against the frontier

GPT-6 Astra (Medium) is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, Claude Opus 5.5 (High, Default Fallback) scores 53.60 for $2172.
Qwen3 235B A22B 2507 (Reasoning) is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, MiMo-V2.6-Pro scores 46.30 for $207.

GPT-6 Astra (Medium)Qwen3 235B A22B 2507 (Reasoning)Today's Pareto frontierOpen-weights frontierEvery other model

Matchup

Compare something else

Agents: Accept: text/markdown or ?format=md returns this page as Markdown. JSON: /api/v1/compare/gpt-6-astra-medium/qwen3-235b-a22b-instruct-2507-reasoning · Markdown: /api/v1/compare/gpt-6-astra-medium/qwen3-235b-a22b-instruct-2507-reasoning?format=md · llms.txt · agent skill