# Grok 4.3, Mistral Medium 3.5 weights, and the Qwen3.6 family

> xAI ships Grok 4.3 with a 1M window, Mistral releases a 128B open model, and Alibaba and NVIDIA add open mid-size models.

Published 13 Oct 2026. Coverage: 27 Apr 2026 to 3 May 2026. By Ali Asif.

## Items

1. **Grok 4.3** (xAI, Frontier): A 1M-token context taking text and images, five reasoning levels, and $1.25 in and $2.50 out per million tokens under 200K-token prompts. [Primary source](https://docs.x.ai/developers/models/grok-4.3)
2. **Mistral Medium 3.5** (Mistral AI, Open weights): A 128B dense open-weights model with a 256K context that folds instruction following, reasoning and coding into one set of weights. [Primary source](https://docs.mistral.ai/models/model-cards/mistral-medium-3-5-26-04)
3. **Qwen3.6-35B-A3B** (Alibaba Qwen, Open weights): The first open-weight Qwen3.6 model, a 35B mixture-of-experts with only 3B parameters active, pitched at agentic coding. [Primary source](https://qwen.ai/blog?id=qwen3.6-35b-a3b)
4. **Nemotron 3 Nano Omni** (NVIDIA, Open weights): An open 30B-A3B model that takes video, audio, image and text and acts as the perception layer for agent systems. [Primary source](https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/nemotron-3-nano-omni-multimodal-ai-agents/)
5. **Mistral Workflows** (Mistral AI, Agents and coding): A public-preview orchestration layer built on Temporal, with durable execution, step tracking and a human approval pause. [Primary source](https://mistral.ai/news/workflows/)
6. **GLM-5V-Turbo: Toward a Native Foundation Model for Multimodal Agents** (arXiv, Agents and coding): The technical write-up for Z.ai's multimodal agent model. [Primary source](https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.26752)
7. **Recursive Multi-Agent Systems** (arXiv, Agents and coding): The week's top Hugging Face paper, on multi-agent systems with a recursive structure. [Primary source](https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.25917)

The week closed with a crowd of mid-size open models, and I think they are the quiet story.

## Grok 4.3

xAI's Grok 4.3 closed out April. The model page lists a one-million-token context, text and image input, and reasoning levels from none to xhigh with low as the default. Prices are $1.25 input and $2.50 output per million tokens for prompts under 200K, doubling at or above that size, with a 20% batch discount. xAI says it leads on agentic tool calling and instruction following, which is its own claim. I would call it a price move as much as a model move.

## Mistral Medium 3.5

Mistral released Medium 3.5 around April 26 to 28 as open weights under a modified MIT license. It is a 128B dense model with a 256K context that takes text and images, and the reasoning effort can be set per request, so a quick chat reply and a long agent run can use the same weights. Mistral reports 77.6% on SWE-Bench Verified, ahead of its own Devstral 2. It is also priced at $1.50 and $7.50 per million tokens on Mistral's API. The same week Mistral put Workflows into public preview, an orchestration layer where developers write Python, every step is tracked in Studio, and a single call pauses a run for human approval.

## Qwen and NVIDIA go small and open

Alibaba's Qwen3.6-35B-A3B is the first open-weight model in the 3.6 line: 35B total, 3B active, aimed at agentic coding. Alibaba says the weights are on Hugging Face and ModelScope and that the same model runs on its API as qwen3.6-flash, so you can test it hosted before you download anything. NVIDIA's Nemotron 3 Nano Omni arrived April 28 as an open 30B-A3B hybrid with a 256K context. It reads video, audio, images and text, and NVIDIA positions it as the perception sub-agent inside larger agent systems, claiming up to 9.2 times more effective capacity on video reasoning than comparable open omni models. That figure is NVIDIA's.

## Papers

Z.ai published the technical write-up for GLM-5V-Turbo, and Recursive Multi-Agent Systems led the weekly Hugging Face list.

What I'd watch next: whether Medium 3.5's four-GPU claim holds up when someone loads a full 256K context on real hardware.

## My take

Mistral says Medium 3.5 can be self-hosted on as few as four GPUs. That is a machine a regional enterprise can own and put in a data room, which matters more to the buyers I deal with than a leaderboard position. The Workflows launch interests me for a different reason: a one-line human approval pause is exactly the gate I want before any agent contacts a supplier.

## Sources

- https://docs.x.ai/developers/models/grok-4.3
- https://docs.mistral.ai/models/model-cards/mistral-medium-3-5-26-04
- https://qwen.ai/blog?id=qwen3.6-35b-a3b
- https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/nemotron-3-nano-omni-multimodal-ai-agents/
- https://mistral.ai/news/workflows/
- https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.26752
- https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.25917

Canonical: https://heyaliasif.com/ai/2026-04-27-week-in-ai