Kimi K2 vs Phi-3.5-MoE Instruct

Moonshot AI

Kimi K2, released by Moonshot AI on July 11, 2025, is an open-weight Mixture-of-Experts large language model with 1 trillion total parameters and 32 billion active parameters per inference. It features a 256K token context window (expanded from 128K in an September 2025 update) and demonstrated strong performance on agentic coding benchmarks. Kimi K2 targets software engineering agents, tool-use workflows, and open-source deployments under a modified MIT license.

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.