# GPT-4.1 vs Qwen3 8B

> GPT-4.1 is the stronger model overall, scoring 35.7 to 33.3 on the Noometry Index. Qwen3 8B costs 11× less per token, which makes it the better buy when GPT-4.1's lead doesn't matter for your workload.

- Canonical page: https://noometry.com/compare/gpt-4-1-vs-qwen3-8b
- Last updated: 2026-10-10
- Shared benchmarks: 9

## Summary

- They share 9 benchmarks with published results for both. GPT-4.1 scores higher in 4 categories and Qwen3 8B in 2 categories; 4 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
- The widest gap is in math, where Qwen3 8B leads 33.3 to 21.4.
- The biggest single-benchmark swing is OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025: 38.3% for GPT-4.1 and 56.1% for Qwen3 8B.
- Qwen3 8B is cheaper at $0.18 / $0.70 per million input/output tokens, against $2 / $8 for GPT-4.1.
- GPT-4.1 accepts more context: 1.05M tokens versus 131K.
- Qwen3 8B has downloadable open weights; the other is API-only.

## Snapshot

| | GPT-4.1 | Qwen3 8B |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | OpenAI | Alibaba (Qwen) |
| Noometry Index | 35.7 | 33.3 |
| Rank | 215 | 237 |
| Context | 1.05M | 131K |
| Input $/M | $2 | $0.18 |
| Output $/M | $8 | $0.70 |
| Weights | Proprietary | Open |

## Coding

- GPT-4.1: 34.2 (#228)
- Qwen3 8B: 33.4 (#245)

| Benchmark | GPT-4.1 | Qwen3 8B |
|---|---|---|
| SWE-bench Verified | 48.5% | — |
| SWE-bench Verified (bash only) | 39.6% | — |
| Aider Polyglot | 52.4% | — |
| SciCode | — | 22.6% |
| WeirdML | 39% | — |
| LMArena Coding | 1391 | — |
| CadEval | 42% | — |
| ALE-Bench | 558.1 | — |

## Agentic & Tool Use

- GPT-4.1: 34.4 (#40)
- Qwen3 8B: 29.9 (#71)

| Benchmark | GPT-4.1 | Qwen3 8B |
|---|---|---|
| Berkeley Function Calling Leaderboard | 54% | 42.6% |

## Reasoning

- GPT-4.1: 11.7 (#334)
- Qwen3 8B: 16.1 (#299)

| Benchmark | GPT-4.1 | Qwen3 8B |
|---|---|---|
| Chess Puzzles | 6% | 5% |
| DTBench | 68.3% | 59.7% |
| LMCA | 25.6% | 8.8% |
| Epoch Capabilities Index | 136.79 | 136.17 |
| ARC-AGI-2 | 0.4% | — |
| SimpleBench | 27% | — |
| Kagi LLM Benchmark | 52.3% | — |
| ARC-AGI-1 | 5.5% | — |
| CritPt | — | 0% |
| EnigmaEval | 2.2% | — |
| LMArena Hard Prompts | 1384 | — |
| ForecastBench | 61.5 | — |

## Math

- GPT-4.1: 21.4 (#269)
- Qwen3 8B: 33.3 (#176)

| Benchmark | GPT-4.1 | Qwen3 8B |
|---|---|---|
| OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025 | 38.3% | 56.1% |
| FrontierMath (Tiers 1-3) | 6% | — |
| Omni-MATH | 47.1% | — |
| LMArena Math | 1369 | — |
| MATH Level 5 | 83% | — |
| FrontierMath (Feb 2025 set) | 5.5% | — |
| FrontierMath Tier 4 (v1) | 0% | — |

## Knowledge

- GPT-4.1: 37.0 (#152)
- Qwen3 8B: 36.1 (#164)

| Benchmark | GPT-4.1 | Qwen3 8B |
|---|---|---|
| GPQA Diamond | 66.9% | 56.8% |
| Vectara Hallucination Rate | 5.6% | 4.8% |
| Humanity's Last Exam | 5.4% | — |
| SimpleQA Verified | 31.1% | — |
| MMLU-Pro | 81.1% | — |
| GPQA (HELM) | 65.9% | — |
| LMArena Expert | 1364 | — |

## Multimodal

- GPT-4.1: 37.5 (#66)
- Qwen3 8B: —

| Benchmark | GPT-4.1 | Qwen3 8B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Vision | 1210 | — |
| GeoBench | 72% | — |

## Multilingual

- GPT-4.1: 49.6 (#128)
- Qwen3 8B: —

| Benchmark | GPT-4.1 | Qwen3 8B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | 1370 | — |
| LMArena Chinese | 1382 | — |
| LMArena French | 1383 | — |
| LMArena German | 1380 | — |
| LMArena Japanese | 1320 | — |
| LMArena Korean | 1339 | — |
| LMArena Russian | 1377 | — |
| LMArena Spanish | 1375 | — |

## Instruction Following

- GPT-4.1: 71.5 (#148)
- Qwen3 8B: —

| Benchmark | GPT-4.1 | Qwen3 8B |
|---|---|---|
| IFEval | 83.8% | — |
| LMArena Instruction Following | 1367 | — |

## Long Context

- GPT-4.1: 40.0 (#158)
- Qwen3 8B: 37.8 (#205)

| Benchmark | GPT-4.1 | Qwen3 8B |
|---|---|---|
| Fiction.LiveBench | 63.9% | 62.1% |
| LMArena Longer Query | 1385 | — |

## Writing & Preference

- GPT-4.1: 57.8 (#120)
- Qwen3 8B: —

| Benchmark | GPT-4.1 | Qwen3 8B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | 1383 | — |
| LMArena Creative Writing | 1363 | — |
| EQ-Bench Creative Writing | 1420 | — |
| WildBench | 85.4% | — |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | 1398 | — |

## FAQ

### Is GPT-4.1 better than Qwen3 8B?

GPT-4.1 is the stronger model overall, scoring 35.7 to 33.3 on the Noometry Index. Qwen3 8B costs 11× less per token, which makes it the better buy when GPT-4.1's lead doesn't matter for your workload.

### Which is cheaper, GPT-4.1 or Qwen3 8B?

Qwen3 8B is cheaper. It lists at $0.18 per million input tokens and $0.70 per million output tokens; GPT-4.1 lists at $2 and $8.

### Is GPT-4.1 or Qwen3 8B better for coding?

They score almost the same on coding (34.2 vs 33.4); test both on your own repository before choosing.

### Which has the bigger context window?

GPT-4.1 does, with 1.05M tokens against 131K.

### How many benchmarks do GPT-4.1 and Qwen3 8B share?

9 benchmarks have published results for both models. GPT-4.1 has 52 scored results on Noometry and Qwen3 8B has 11.