Gemini 2.5 Flash vs Phi-3.5-MoE Instruct

Gemini 2.5 Flash

Google DeepMind

Gemini 2.5 Flash, released by Google in June 2025, is a large language model from the Gemini 2.5 family optimized for high-throughput, cost-efficient deployments with multimodal reasoning. It features a 1M token context window, hybrid thinking control, and native support for text, image, video, and audio input. Gemini 2.5 Flash targets latency-sensitive applications, document analysis, and high-volume API workloads that benefit from combined reasoning and generation in a single model.

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.