Claude 3.5 Sonnet vs Phi-3.5-MoE Instruct

Claude 3.5 Sonnet

Anthropic

Claude 3.5 Sonnet, updated by Anthropic in October 2024 (originally released June 2024), is a large language model from the Claude 3.5 family that delivered strong performance in coding, reasoning, and instruction-following at its release. It supports a 200K token context window, 8K maximum output tokens, and native image understanding including screenshot analysis and document comprehension. Claude 3.5 Sonnet targets general-purpose development tasks, document analysis, and applications requiring reliable instruction following with visual input support.

Phi-3.5-MoE Instruct

Microsoft

Phi-3.5-MoE-instruct is a sparse mixture-of-experts model from Microsoft's Phi research team, released in August 2024 with 42 billion total parameters across 16 experts and approximately 6.6 billion active parameters per forward pass. The model applies Microsoft's small-data, high-quality training philosophy — developed across earlier Phi generations — to a MoE architecture, targeting reasoning quality comparable to much larger dense models at a fraction of the inference compute. Released under the MIT license, it was notable in the research community for demonstrating that MoE efficiency gains could be realized at smaller total parameter counts than typical large-scale MoE deployments.