Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) Decoded: How Sparse AI Models Achieve High Performance with Lower Costs

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE): The Secret Behind DeepSeek, Mistral, and Qwen3 In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have continuously broken records in terms of capabilities and size, with some models now boasting hundreds of billions of parameters. However, a recent trend has enabled these massive models to achieve efficiency simultaneously: Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) layers. The AI community is buzzing about MoE because new models like DeepSeek, Mistral Mixtral, and Alibaba’s Qwen3 leverage this technique to deliver high performance at a lower computational cost. For example, DeepSeek-R1, with an impressive 671 billion parameters, only activates approximately 37 billion of them for any given …