Llama 4 Maverick vs Phi-3.5-MoE Instruct

Llama 4 Maverick

Meta AI

Llama 4 Maverick, released by Meta on April 5, 2025, is a natively multimodal Mixture-of-Experts large language model with 400 billion total parameters and 17 billion active parameters per inference. It features a 1M token context window and supports text and image input, enabling strong performance on both language and vision tasks. Maverick targets open-source deployments requiring large-scale multimodal reasoning, released under Meta's custom 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.