Phi-3.5-MoE Instruct vs Seed 2.0 Pro

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 2.0 Pro is ByteDance's flagship general-purpose model, released in February 2026 under the Doubao brand through the Volcengine API platform, developed by the company's Seed research team as a foundation for agentic applications requiring long-horizon reasoning and multimodal input comprehension. The model accepts text, images, and extended video — including hour-length recordings — targeting enterprise use cases in long-form document analysis, agentic coding (integrated with ByteDance's TRAE IDE), and multi-turn reasoning tasks. It anchors a three-tier product family alongside Seed 2.0 Lite and Mini, positioned as ByteDance's response to frontier model competition in the Chinese and global enterprise AI markets.