Phi-3.5-MoE Instruct vs Qwen3 Coder Next

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

Qwen3 Coder Next is a coding-specialized open-weight model from Alibaba's Qwen3 family, built on the Qwen3-Next architecture with hybrid attention and Mixture-of-Experts design optimized for local development and agentic coding workflows. It targets on-device and self-hosted deployments requiring a capable coding agent that can operate within consumer hardware constraints.