GPT-4o vs Phi-3.5-MoE Instruct

GPT-4o

OpenAI

GPT-4o, released by OpenAI in May 2024, is a multimodal large language model from the GPT-4 family that natively processes text, image, and audio inputs in a single end-to-end model. It features a 128K token context window and demonstrated competitive performance across coding, reasoning, and vision benchmarks at its release. GPT-4o targets general-purpose assistant applications, vision-enabled workflows, and use cases requiring low-latency multimodal understanding.

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.