Phi-3.5-MoE Instruct vs Qwen2.5-Coder 7B Instruct

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.

Alibaba / Qwen

Qwen2.5-Coder-7B-Instruct is a 7-billion-parameter code-specialized model from Alibaba, released in November 2024 as part of the Qwen2.5-Coder family, trained on a curated corpus spanning 92 programming languages with emphasis on code generation, debugging, and fill-in-the-middle completion. Built on the Qwen2.5 architecture, it extends the base series' improvements in instruction-following and long-context handling to coding-specific tasks within a compact deployable footprint. It became popular for integration into IDE extensions, CI pipelines, and self-hosted code assistant tools.