Nova 2 Lite vs Phi-3.5-MoE Instruct

Nova 2 Lite

Amazon

Amazon Nova 2 Lite, released by Amazon Web Services on December 2, 2025, is a fast, cost-efficient reasoning model available on Amazon Bedrock with a 1M token context window enabling extended document, video, and image analysis. It features three extended thinking intensity levels, built-in code interpreter, web grounding tools, and native support for text, image, video, and document input. Nova 2 Lite targets cost-sensitive agentic applications, document analysis pipelines, and real-time workloads requiring multimodal reasoning.

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.