Grok 4.1 Fast vs Phi-3.5-MoE Instruct

Grok 4.1 Fast

xAI

Grok 4.1 Fast, released by xAI in November 2025, is a fast-response variant from the Grok 4 family featuring a 2M token context window designed for high-throughput applications. It omits thinking tokens for immediate responses, reducing latency while maintaining strong output quality. Grok 4.1 Fast targets production APIs, real-time assistants, and cost-sensitive applications requiring long-context understanding at high volume.

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.