In practice
It enables models with hundreds of billions of parameters but inference cost closer to a much smaller one. Mixtral, DeepSeek, and GPT-4 use it. For API users nothing changes, but it explains surprising quality-to-price ratios.
Related terms
Seen in the wild
24 entries mentioning it- HighZ.ai opens GLM-5.3-Flash: mystery model Ox Alpha revealed, MIT-licensed 320B MoE
- HighAlibaba publishes Qwen3.8-Max weights: the first downloadable Max-class model
- HighMoonshot AI ships Kimi K3: 2.8 trillion parameters, the largest open-weight model ever released
- HighThinking Machines Lab releases Inkling: a 975B-parameter multimodal MoE with Apache 2.0 open weights
- LandmarkMeta releases Llama 4.1: Scout, Maverick, and Behemoth MoE models under Apache 2.0
- LandmarkDeepSeek V4 Preview: 1.6T parameters, 1M context, open weight in two sizes
- HighAlibaba releases Qwen 3.5: sparse multimodal MoE, 262K context, Apache 2.0
- HighDeepSeek R2: the Chinese lab relaunches its open-weight reasoning model
- HighLlama 4 Scout: 109B multimodal MoE with 10M context and vision SOTA
- HighQwen 3: Alibaba ships an open-weight family from 0.6B to 235B with native thinking
- HighLlama 4: Meta moves to MoE and native multimodal, but the community is unimpressed
- MediumDeepSeek-V3-0324: the quiet update that puts vendor lock-in on notice
- HighDeepSeek-V3: GPT-4o Quality at $0.55/M Tokens via MLA and FP8 Pipeline
- LandmarkDeepSeek-V3: China releases a shockingly cheap open frontier model
- HighDeepSeek-Coder-V2: GPT-4 Turbo coding quality with open weights
- HighDeepSeek-V2: Multi-head Latent Attention and the first highly efficient Chinese open MoE
- HighMixtral 8x22B: Mistral's Apache 2.0 MoE with 39B active parameters
- MediumSnowflake Arctic: 480B total / 17B active MoE, enterprise SQL SOTA
- MediumDBRX: Databricks's 132B-total / 36B-active open MoE
- HighGemini 1.5 Pro: 1 million tokens in context