Qwen 2.5 VL 72B

Overview

Frontier-class open vision-language model from Alibaba, scoring 70.2 on MMMU and 88.6 on MMBench. Uses the Qwen License rather than Apache, with a 100M MAU clause.

When to pick this model

• You need frontier visual reasoning and can run a 70B-class model
• You're processing complex documents, charts, or diagrams at scale
• You need 128K context for long multimodal sessions
• Your product is below the 100M MAU threshold of the Qwen License

VRAM requirements by quantization

Quantization	VRAM required
Q4_K_M (recommended)	42 GB
Q5_K_M	50 GB
Q8_0	78 GB
FP16 (no quantization)	144 GB

VRAM figures include model weights plus a typical 8k KV cache and ~600 MB runtime overhead (Ollama / llama.cpp baseline). Add headroom for higher context lengths.

Published benchmark scores

Benchmark	Score
MMMU	70.2
MathVista	74.8
MMBench-EN	88.6

Scores published by the model author or aggregated from public leaderboards. Re-measured monthly by our editorial team.

Strengths

• Frontier vision benchmarks (MMMU 70.2)
• 128K context window
• Strong OCR and grounding capabilities

Limitations

• Qwen License — not Apache, has a 100M MAU clause
• 40GB+ VRAM in Q4 — multi-GPU for full precision
• Tooling support varies vs the 7B variant

Architecture & training

Architecture: ViT + LLM · GQA · SwiGLU · RMSNorm

Training: 72B backbone + vision encoder.

Quick start

ollama run qwen2.5vl:72b

Or use the open-source MCP server to query this model from Claude Desktop, Cursor, or any MCP-compatible client.