Hy4 preview vs Qwen-Image-Layered: Features, Pricing & Which Is Better (2026)
A side-by-side comparison of Hy4 preview and Qwen-Image-Layered — features, pricing, and ideal use cases — to help you decide which AI tool fits your workflow.
Hy4 preview
Tencent
Tencent's open-weight Hy4 preview, a 770B-parameter Mixture-of-Experts model with 49B active parameters and a 1M-token context window.
Key features
- 770B Mixture-of-Experts Architecture: Holds 770 billion total parameters while activating only 49 billion per token, so capacity scales without proportional inference cost.
- 1M-Token Context Window: Accepts inputs exceeding one million tokens, allowing whole codebases, long document sets or extended agent traces in a single prompt.
- Apache 2.0 Open Weights: Released under a permissive licence that allows commercial use, modification and redistribution with no separate agreement.
- Productivity Task Focus: Tuned for real-world coding, office work and scientific research rather than narrow benchmark optimisation.
- Multi-Product Availability: Accessible globally through Tencent's WorkBuddy, CodeBuddy, Yuanbao and ima applications in addition to the raw weights.
- API Access via TokenHub and OpenRouter: Can be called through Tencent Cloud TokenHub or OpenRouter for teams that prefer hosted inference over self-hosting.
Best for
- Whole-Repository Code Work: Load an entire codebase into the million-token context to reason about refactors and cross-file dependencies at once.
- Long-Horizon Agent Tasks: Drive multi-step agent workflows where the full history of tool calls and intermediate results must stay in context.
- Self-Hosted Deployment: Run a frontier-scale open-weight model on private infrastructure where data cannot leave the organisation.
- Scientific Literature Analysis: Ingest large collections of papers or experimental logs and synthesise findings without chunking the input.
- Office Document Processing: Summarise, draft and restructure long reports, contracts and spreadsheets in enterprise workflows.
- Commercial Fine-Tuning: Adapt the weights for a proprietary product under the Apache 2.0 licence without negotiating a model licence.
Qwen-Image-Layered
Qwen team, Alibaba Cloud
A named image-layered component associated with the Qwen model family from the Qwen team at Alibaba Cloud.
Key features
- Layered image composition and analysis
- Multimodal inputs (text + image)
- Model weights and code published on GitHub
- Self-hosting and fine-tuning capability
- Playable via cloud-hosted inference when provided by Alibaba Cloud
- Public GitHub repository for the Qwen3 model series (source link provided)
- Developed and maintained by the Qwen team at Alibaba Cloud
- Repository-level hosting of model assets, documentation, and code for the Qwen3 series
- No specific feature list for 'Qwen-Image-Layered' is present in the provided content
- Technical APIs, integrations, platforms, and requirements are not detailed in the provided content
Best for
- Image editing and compositional generation
- Vision-language tasks (captioning, VQA) with layered inputs
- Design and advertising content generation
- Research, fine-tuning, and benchmarking
- Integration into cloud-hosted applications via Alibaba Cloud
- Not specified in the provided content; repository likely intended for research, development, and model distribution for the Qwen3 series
- Users should consult the GitHub repository for concrete use cases, examples, and integration instructions