The Known Good Updated 25 Jul 2026
OpenAI: o3 vs Qwen: Qwen3.6 Max Preview ·OpenAI vs Alibaba

OpenAI: o3 vs Qwen: Qwen3.6 Max Preview — head-to-head comparison

OpenAI: o3 profile Qwen: Qwen3.6 Max Preview profile All comparisons
OpenAI: o3 — OpenAI
Quality
#28 of 61
67based on 4 of 6 evaluations
Known Good Index
Speed
#70 of 316
88.5
Output tokens per second
Price
#269 of 340
$3.50
Blended per 1M tokens
In $2.00 · Out $8.00
Cache hit price
#175 of 206
$0.50
per 1M tokens (−75%)
Context
#203 of 345
200k
tokens (~300 pages)
Qwen: Qwen3.6 Max Preview — Alibaba
Quality
#9 of 61
90based on 3 of 6 evaluations
Known Good Index
Speed
#176 of 316
46.4
Output tokens per second
Price
#246 of 340
$2.34
Blended per 1M tokens
In $1.04 · Out $6.24
Cache hit price
#113 of 206
$0.13
per 1M tokens (−88%)
Context
#130 of 345
262k
tokens (~400 pages)
Summary

On the Known Good Index, OpenAI: o3 scores 67 and Qwen: Qwen3.6 Max Preview scores 90 — a 23-point lead for Qwen: Qwen3.6 Max Preview. They share 3 published evaluations, with OpenAI: o3 ahead on 0 and Qwen: Qwen3.6 Max Preview ahead on 3.

Blended pricing is $3.50 per 1M tokens for OpenAI: o3 and $2.34 for Qwen: Qwen3.6 Max Preview — Qwen: Qwen3.6 Max Preview is about 1.5× cheaper.

Throughput is 88 tokens per second for OpenAI: o3 and 46 for Qwen: Qwen3.6 Max Preview, with time to first token at 2.7s and 1.4s. OpenAI: o3 accepts 200k tokens of context against 262k.

OpenAI: o3 is proprietary; Qwen: Qwen3.6 Max Preview is proprietary. 2 tracked hosts serve one or both.

Generated from tracked data on 25 Jul 2026 · how these comparisons are computed →

At a glance
MetricOpenAI: o3Qwen: Qwen3.6 Max Preview
Known Good Index 67 based on 4 of 6 evaluations 90 based on 3 of 6 evaluations
Blended $/1M $3.50 $2.34
Output tok/s 88 46
Context window 200k 262k
Providers 1 1
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Quality

Known Good Index and the capability indices, side by side

IndicesComponents
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: o3Qwen: Qwen3.6 Max Preview
Known Good Index 67 90
Mathematics Index 92 91
Science Index 84 93
Reasoning Index 62 —
Agentic Index 60 87
Openness Index 5 5
The Known Good

Quality Breakdown

Every evaluation both models report a published score for

Evaluations both models report

Bar = OpenAI: o3 · marker = Qwen: Qwen3.6 Max Preview · scores ingested from Epoch AI (CC-BY 4.0)

GPQA Diamond82 / 89
MATH / AIME84 / 91
SWE-bench Verified62 / 77

Right-hand figures read OpenAI: o3 / Qwen: Qwen3.6 Max Preview. OpenAI: o3 leads on 0 of 3, Qwen: Qwen3.6 Max Preview on 3.

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.

MetricOpenAI: o3Qwen: Qwen3.6 Max Preview
Text Arena — 1,456
Text Arena (style controlled) — 1,460
The Known Good

Price & Cost

Published API pricing by token type

Per token typeCache discount
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: o3Qwen: Qwen3.6 Max Preview
Input $/1M $2.00 $1.04
Output $/1M $8.00 $6.24
Blended $/1M $3.50 $2.34
Cache read $/1M $0.500 $0.130
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: o3Qwen: Qwen3.6 Max Preview
Context window 200k 262k
Max output tokens 100k 66k
The Known Good

Speed & Latency

Median throughput and time to first token across hosting providers

Output speedTime to first token
Throughput and latency

Medians across all tracked providers, derived from OpenRouter endpoint telemetry.

MetricOpenAI: o3Qwen: Qwen3.6 Max Preview
Output tokens/s 88 46
Time to first token 2.7s 1.4s
The Known Good

Providers

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

2 hosts
Full provider benchmarks →
Provider OpenAI: o3 blendedOpenAI: o3 tok/s Qwen: Qwen3.6 Max Preview blendedQwen: Qwen3.6 Max Preview tok/s
OpenAI · first party $3.50 72 — —
Alibaba · first party — — $2.34 46

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)Elo — Arena Full attribution →