GPT-5.1 Thinking vs Phi-3.5-MoE Instruct

GPT-5.1 Thinking

OpenAI

GPT-5.1 Thinking, released by OpenAI in November 2025, is an extended reasoning variant from the GPT-5.1 family that applies chain-of-thought processing to improve accuracy on complex reasoning, mathematics, and coding tasks. It targets analytical workflows where deliberate reasoning over a problem significantly improves output quality.

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.