Phi-3.5-MoE Instruct vs UI-TARS-72B-DPO

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

UI-TARS-72B-DPO, released by ByteDance in early 2025, is a 72 billion parameter multimodal large language model from the UI-TARS family, built on Qwen-2-VL and fine-tuned for automated GUI interaction and computer control. It features native understanding of screenshots, UI elements, and web interfaces, achieving strong results across GUI benchmarks for perception, grounding, and agentic control. UI-TARS-72B-DPO targets computer-use agents, web automation, and applications requiring robust visual UI reasoning.