Qwen2.5-72B vs o1

Side-by-side benchmark comparison across knowledge, coding, math, and reasoning.

Qwen2.5-72B is clearly ahead on the aggregate, 72 to 51. The gap is large enough that you do not need to squint at the spreadsheet to see the difference.

Qwen2.5-72B's sharpest advantage is in coding, where it averages 53.7 against 41. The single biggest benchmark swing on the page is AIME 2024, 86 to 74.3. o1 does hit back in knowledge, so the answer changes if that is the part of the workload you care about most.

o1 is the reasoning model in the pair, while Qwen2.5-72B is not. That usually helps on harder chain-of-thought-heavy tests, but it can also mean more latency and more token spend in real use. o1 gives you the larger context window at 200K, compared with 128K for Qwen2.5-72B.

Quick Verdict

Pick Qwen2.5-72B if you want the stronger benchmark profile. o1 only becomes the better choice if knowledge is the priority or you need the larger 200K context window.

Knowledge

o1

Qwen2.5-72B

68.2

o1

83.8

83
MMLU
91.8
82
GPQA
75.7
80
SuperGPQA
-
78
OpenBookQA
-
75
MMLU-Pro
-
11
HLE
-

Coding

Qwen2.5-72B

Qwen2.5-72B

53.7

o1

41

75
HumanEval
-
46
SWE-bench Verified
41
40
LiveCodeBench
-

Mathematics

Qwen2.5-72B

Qwen2.5-72B

83.1

o1

74.3

84
AIME 2023
-
86
AIME 2024
74.3
85
AIME 2025
-
80
HMMT Feb 2023
-
82
HMMT Feb 2024
-
81
HMMT Feb 2025
-
83
BRUMO 2025
-
84
MATH-500
-

Reasoning

Qwen2.5-72B
80
SimpleQA
-
78
MuSR
-
81
BBH
-

Instruction Following

o1

Qwen2.5-72B

85

o1

92.2

85
IFEval
92.2

Multilingual

Qwen2.5-72B
84
MGSM
-

Frequently Asked Questions

Which is better, Qwen2.5-72B or o1?

Qwen2.5-72B is ahead overall, 72 to 51. The biggest single separator in this matchup is AIME 2024, where the scores are 86 and 74.3.

Which is better for knowledge tasks, Qwen2.5-72B or o1?

o1 has the edge for knowledge tasks in this comparison, averaging 83.8 versus 68.2. Inside this category, MMLU is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for coding, Qwen2.5-72B or o1?

Qwen2.5-72B has the edge for coding in this comparison, averaging 53.7 versus 41. Inside this category, SWE-bench Verified is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for math, Qwen2.5-72B or o1?

Qwen2.5-72B has the edge for math in this comparison, averaging 83.1 versus 74.3. Inside this category, AIME 2024 is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for instruction following, Qwen2.5-72B or o1?

o1 has the edge for instruction following in this comparison, averaging 92.2 versus 85. Inside this category, IFEval is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Last updated: March 9, 2026

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