o3 vs Phi-3.5-MoE Instruct

o3

OpenAI

OpenAI o3, released by OpenAI in April 2025, is a large reasoning model that applies extended chain-of-thought processing to deliver improved performance on complex math, science, and coding tasks. It features a 200K token context window and native image understanding, with demonstrated strong results on mathematics and software engineering benchmarks. o3 targets demanding analytical and engineering tasks where deliberate, multi-step reasoning produces significantly better outcomes 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.