DeepSeek-V3.1 vs Phi-3.5-MoE Instruct

DeepSeek-V3.1

DeepSeek

DeepSeek-V3.1, released by DeepSeek in August 2025, is a hybrid large language model with 671 billion total parameters (37 billion active) that unifies the capabilities of DeepSeek-V3 and DeepSeek-R1 in a single model. It features a 128K token context window and supports both direct generation and extended reasoning modes selectable via the chat template. DeepSeek-V3.1 targets general-purpose tasks, coding, and complex reasoning under an open MIT license.

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.