GPT-5 Codex vs Phi-3.5-MoE Instruct

GPT-5 Codex

OpenAI

GPT-5 Codex, released by OpenAI in August 2025, is a coding-specialized large language model from the GPT-5 family engineered for software engineering, code generation, and agentic development workflows. It builds on GPT-5's architecture with optimizations targeting multi-file code editing, test generation, and automated debugging. GPT-5 Codex targets developers and agentic coding tools requiring a model tuned specifically for programming tasks.

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.