o1 vs Phi-3.5-MoE Instruct

o1

OpenAI

OpenAI o1, released by OpenAI in December 2024, is a reasoning-focused large language model that applies extended chain-of-thought processing before generating responses. It features a 200K token context window and native image understanding, demonstrating strong performance on STEM benchmarks requiring multi-step reasoning. o1 targets mathematics, science, and coding tasks where careful deliberation over the problem produces more accurate outputs than direct generation.

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.