Gemini 3.1 Pro vs Phi-3.5-MoE Instruct

Gemini 3.1 Pro

Google DeepMind

Gemini 3.1 Pro is a multimodal language model from Google DeepMind, released in preview in February 2026 as a point-version upgrade to Gemini 3 Pro focused on improving reasoning depth, factual grounding, and coding and agentic task performance. The model accepts text, images, video, audio, and PDFs as inputs across a 1M token context window, extending the multimodal breadth of the Gemini 3 series with a companion endpoint specifically optimized for custom tool use in agentic pipelines. Google describes it as built to refine the reliability and performance of the Gemini 3 Pro series, reflecting an incremental engineering iteration rather than an architectural overhaul.

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.