DeepSeek-V3.2 Thinking vs Phi-3.5-MoE Instruct

DeepSeek-V3.2 Thinking

DeepSeek

DeepSeek-V3.2-Exp (DeepSeek-V3.2 Thinking), released by DeepSeek in September 2025, is the experimental preview release of the DeepSeek-V3.2 model featuring 685 billion total parameters and integrated thinking capabilities. It introduced the architecture and training approaches that became the foundation of the final V3.2 release, including thinking in tool-use and hybrid reasoning modes.

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.