Phi-3.5-MoE Instruct vs Seed-1.8

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.

ByteDance

Seed-1.8, developed by ByteDance Seed, is a generalized agentic large language model supporting text and image input, with industry-leading GUI agent capabilities and improvements in multimodal reasoning over its predecessor Seed1.5-VL. It targets information retrieval, code generation, GUI interaction, and complex agentic workflows requiring robust multimodal understanding.