Phi-3.5-MoE Instruct vs Qwen2.5-VL 32B 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-VL-32B-Instruct is a 32-billion-parameter vision-language model from Alibaba, extending the Qwen2.5 architecture with multimodal capabilities for understanding images, documents, charts, and video frames alongside text. The model was designed for tasks requiring deep visual reasoning — such as document parsing, table extraction, and spatial understanding — with performance that made it a practical choice for document intelligence and visual data analysis workflows. As an open-weight model, it became a widely adopted foundation for fine-tuning domain-specific multimodal applications.