o3 Pro vs Phi-3.5-MoE Instruct

o3 Pro

OpenAI

OpenAI o3-pro, released by OpenAI in June 2025, is an extended reasoning model from the o3 family that applies more compute per response to deliver deeper, more thorough answers on complex problems. It features a 200K token context window, 100K maximum output tokens, and vision capabilities. o3-pro targets research-grade reasoning tasks, extended coding sessions, and applications where accuracy on difficult problems justifies higher inference cost and latency.

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.