Microsoft launches lightweight AI model Phi-3-mini

April 26, 2024

Microsoft has launched Phi-3 Mini, a freely available, lightweight small language AI model.
The company plans to further release two other models in the same scale.
The model is meant to be simpler and cheaper compared to other heavyweight large language models like OpenAI’s GPT-4 Turbo.
This is the smallest model that Microsoft has released yet and can be run locally, which means it can run for free on a smartphone without requiring an internet connection.
The model can also run on the chips that power regular computer instead of the expensive and hard to find AI processors that Nvidia makes.
Phi-3 mini has 3.8 billion parameters while the two other models that are yet to be released Phi-3 Small and Phi-3 Medium will have 7 billion parameters and 14 billion parameters respectively.
The Phi-3 mini will be available on Azure, Hugging Face and Ollama.
The company had released Phi-2 in December that performed on par with bigger models like Llama 2.
According to Microsoft Phi-3 performs better than this older version and can respond to queries in a manner that is close to a model 10 times bigger its size.