Llama-3.3 Nemotron Super 49B vs Phi-3.5-MoE Instruct

Llama-3.3 Nemotron Super 49B

NVIDIA

Llama-3.3-Nemotron-Super-49B-v1 is a 49-billion-parameter model from NVIDIA, fine-tuned from Meta's Llama 3.3 using NVIDIA's Nemotron post-training pipeline that combines supervised fine-tuning with reinforcement learning to enhance reasoning, instruction alignment, and complex problem-solving. The Super tier in the Nemotron family represents a mid-range capability level — positioned above the Nano series and below the Ultra 253B flagship — offering a balance between high-quality outputs and manageable inference infrastructure requirements. Released open-weight on HuggingFace with NVIDIA NIM support, it targets teams with multi-GPU setups who need strong reasoning capability without the scale of the Ultra 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.