GPT-OSS-120B vs Phi-3.5-MoE Instruct

GPT-OSS-120B

OpenAI

GPT-OSS-120B, released by OpenAI in August 2025, is an open-weight large language model with 120 billion parameters distributed under the Apache 2.0 license. It represents OpenAI's entry into the open-source model space, enabling developers to self-host and fine-tune a GPT-5-generation-class model. GPT-OSS-120B targets research applications, on-premises deployments, and custom fine-tuning workflows requiring a large open-weight base model.

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.