GLM-4.5 Air vs Phi-3.5-MoE Instruct

Zhipu AI

GLM-4.5 Air is a lightweight variant from Zhipu AI's GLM-4 model family, designed for efficient deployments requiring lower inference cost while maintaining strong language understanding and generation capabilities. It targets cost-sensitive production workloads, API integrations, and applications where the full GLM-4.x series capacity exceeds requirements.

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.