Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B is a cutting-edge reasoning model built on the latest Qwen3-Next framework, including Instruct and Thinking variants. It features 80 billion total parameters while activating only 3 billion during inference, delivering high efficiency and powerful performance that competes with significantly larger dense models.
In this article, we’ll review the performance of Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B and explore the top 3 API providers—Novita, Clarifai, and Hyperbolic—and compare their basics, performance, and pricing to help you choose the right fit for your AI workflow.
What is Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B?
Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B is the first installment in the Qwen3-Next series, delivering state-of-the-art performance in multiple domains.
Basic Information of Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B
| Specification | Details |
|---|---|
| Parameters | 80B in total with 3B activated |
| Architecture | Mixture-of-Experts |
| Number of Layers | 48 |
| Number of Experts | 512 |
| Training Stage | Pretraining (15T tokens) & Post-training |
| Context window | 262K natively |
| License | Apache 2.0 |
Benchmark and Key Capabilities
Instruct Model Performance
- High performance without extreme scale, giving you near-frontier accuracy without paying for 200B+-class models.
- Strong general reasoning across math, coding, and mixed benchmarks, making it a reliable default model for broad workloads.
- Top performance on Arena-Hard v2, providing strong real-world alignment with human preference tasks.
- Cost-efficient upgrade for teams wanting a powerful instruction model without jumping to ultra-large parameter sizes.
- Well-balanced across domains, suitable for chat, code assistance, analysis, and evaluation tasks with predictable quality.
Thinking Model Performance
- Exceptional deliberate reasoning with standout scores in math (AIME25: 87.8) and long-form logic tasks.
- Better chain-of-thought efficiency, letting you achieve deeper reasoning quality while keeping token usage lower than giant models.
- Strong alternative to expensive reasoning models, outperforming or matching models like Gemini 2.5 Flash Thinking at a lower parameter scale.
- Ideal for decision-making, multi-step problem solving, and scientific workflows, where accuracy and depth matter more than speed.
- High performance across coding and evaluation, making it valuable for engineering, research, and enterprise cognitive tasks.
How to Choose the Right API Provider?
- Context Length (Higher is better): A larger context length lets the model read and process more text in a single run, supporting deeper summaries, longer conversations, and more complex reasoning.
- Token Cost (Lower is better): A lower token cost means each piece of text processed is cheaper, making frequent queries and large scale workloads more budget friendly.
- Latency (Lower is better): Lower latency means the model replies faster, creating smoother interactions that are important for assistants, chat tools, and real time systems.
- Throughput (Higher is better): Higher throughput means the model can handle more requests at the same time, ensuring stable performance even during heavy usage.
Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B API Provider Comparison
| Provider | Context Length | Input/Output Price | Output Speed (Tokens per sec) | Latency | Function Calling | JSON Mode |
| Novita AI | 131K | $0.15/$1.5 per 1M Tokens | 147 | 0.89s | ✅ | ✅ |
| Clarifai | 262K | $1.09/$1.08 per 1M Tokens | 175 | 0.32s | ❌ | ❌ |
| Hyperbolic | 262K | $0.3/$0.3 per 1M Tokens | 323 | 0.77s | ❌ | ✅ |
Novita AI delivers the best overall value: the lowest prices, solid speed, and full support for function calling and JSON Mode. It offers the most cost-efficient and developer-friendly option for real production use. Clarifai offers a large context window and low latency, but the high token prices and lack of key features make it expensive and less practical for real-world scaling. Hyperbolic provides fast output speed and a long context, but higher input cost and missing function calling limit its flexibility compared to Novita AI.
Top Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B API Provider: Novita AI
Novita AI provides a simplified cloud environment where developers can launch AI models right away using an easy-to-use API. By offering affordable, ready-to-use multimodal models like Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B, GLM 4.6, Kimi K2 Thinking, DeepSeek V3.2 Exp, GPT-OSS, and others, it eliminates configuration hassles and lets you begin building without delay.
How to Access via Novita AI API?
Step 1: Log In and Access the Model Library
Log in or sign up to your account and click on the Model Library button
Step 2: Choose Your Model
Browse through the available options and select the model that suits your needs.
Step 3: Start Your Free Trial
Begin your free trial to explore the capabilities of the selected model.
Step 4: Get API KEY
To authenticate with the API, Novita AI provides you with a new API key. Entering the “Settings“ page, you can copy the API key as indicated in the image.
Step 5: Install the API
Install API using the package manager specific to your programming language.
Once the installation is complete, bring the required libraries into your development setup. Then load your API key to activate the Novita AI LLM. The following snippet shows how Python users can work with the chat completions API.
from openai import OpenAI
client = OpenAI(
api_key="<Your API Key>",
base_url="https://api.novita.ai/openai"
)
response = client.chat.completions.create(
model="qwen/qwen3-next-80b-a3b-thinking",
messages=[
{"role": "system", "content": "You are a helpful assistant."},
{"role": "user", "content": "Hello, how are you?"}
],
max_tokens=32768,
temperature=0.7
)
print(response.choices[0].message.content)
Top 3 Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B API Provider: Clarifai
Clarifai is an AI company that provides a hybrid cloud platform for building, deploying, and managing artificial intelligence applications across unstructured data like images, videos, and text.
How to Access via Clarifai
from openai import OpenAI
client = OpenAI(
api_key="", # Your Clarifai API key
base_url="https://api.clarifai.com/v2/ext/openai/v1" # Clarifai's OpenAI-compatible API endpoint
)
response = client.chat.completions.create(
model="https://clarifai.com/qwen/qwen3/models/qwen3-next-80B-A3B-Thinking", # Clarifai model URL
messages=[
{"role": "system", "content": "You are a helpful assistant."},
{"role": "user", "content": "Can you explain the concept of quantum entanglement?"}
],
tools=None,
tool_choice=None,
max_completion_tokens=100,
temperature=0.7,
stream=True,
)
Top 3 Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B API Provider: Hyperbolic
Hyperbolic is a company that builds an on-demand platform for AI development that uses a decentralized network of GPU resources to provide affordable compute power.
How to Access via Hyperbolic
import requests
url = "https://api.hyperbolic.xyz/v1/chat/completions"
headers = {
"Content-Type": "application/json",
"Authorization": "Bearer <api-key>"
}
data = {
"messages": [{
"role": "user",
"content": "What can I do in SF?"
}],
"model": "Qwen/Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Instruct",
"max_tokens": 507,
"temperature": 0.7,
"top_p": 0.8
}
response = requests.post(url, headers=headers, json=data)
print(response.json())
Frequently Asked Questions
It is a powerful large language model built on the Qwen3-Next architecture, offering advanced reasoning, strong coding ability, and exceptional performance while keeping inference efficient.
Yes. The Thinking variant is optimized for multi-step reasoning, problem solving, math, and complex analysis tasks.
Novita AI consistently delivers the lowest input cost and strong performance, making it the most cost-effective option for scaling real workloads.
Novita AI is an AI cloud platform that offers developers an easy way to deploy AI models using our simple API, while also providing the affordable and reliable GPU cloud for building and scaling.
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