Microsoft has launched Phi-3 Mini, a compact artificial intelligence model

Microsoft has unveiled the Phi-3 Mini, its new lightweight artificial intelligence model, the first of three announced small models in the Phi-3 family.

Here's What We Know

Phi-3 Mini has only 3.8 billion parameters, which is significantly smaller than large language models like GPT-4. However, according to Microsoft's statement, despite its compact size, the novelty is almost as powerful as GPT-3.5.

According to Eric Boyd, vice president of Microsoft Azure AI Platform, Phi-3 Mini has similar capabilities to the large language models "just in a smaller form factor".

The company also plans to release Phi-3 Small with 7 billion parameters and Phi-3 Medium with 14 billion parameters in the future. The small models have several advantages - they are cheaper to run and work better on personal devices.

According to Boyd, the Phi-3 Mini was trained in a peculiar way "curriculum" inspired by children's book-based learning methods with simple sentence structures, gradually progressing to more complex concepts.

While the compact models can't match the larger ones in terms of breadth of knowledge, they are sufficient for many popular tasks, such as summarising texts, helping with programming or creating chatbots.

When We Can Expect It

Phi-3 Mini is already available in Azure, Hugging Face, and Ollama. Larger versions will follow later.

Source: The Verge