Microsoft debuts Phi-3 to run on smartphones

Bengaluru: Microsoft has unveiled small language models (SLMs) called Phi-3, which rival models of the same size or larger and are designed to run on smartphones and laptops. Phi-3 meets the growing need for different-size models for various tasks and is capable of performing well on key benchmarks that evaluate language, coding, and math capabilities when compared to larger models.

Microsoft has been developing a series of SLMs that offer many of the same capabilities found in larger language models (LLMs) but are smaller in size and are trained on smaller amounts of data. Phi-3-mini, measuring 3.8 billion parameters, performs better than models twice its size, the company said. Phi-3 can generate responses to conversational language prompts that, until recently, were thought to only be achievable with models significantly larger.