GPT-OSS-20B vs Phi-3.5-MoE Instruct

GPT-OSS-20B

OpenAI

GPT-OSS-20B is an open-weight large language model with 20 billion parameters from OpenAI's open-source model initiative. It targets deployments requiring a smaller, efficient model that can run on consumer or mid-tier hardware while maintaining strong reasoning and coding capabilities relative to its size.

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.