Microsoft has finally made its latest small language model, Phi-4, available on Hugging Face. The 14 billion-parameter model can now be downloaded, fine-tuned, and deployed for free.
Why does it matter?
Phi-4 is a tiny model but outperforms Llama 3.3 70B (nearly five times bigger) and OpenAI’s GPT-4o Mini on several benchmarks. In math competition questions, Phi-4 outperformed Gemini 1.5 Pro and OpenAI’s GPT-4o.
Microsoft’s detailed technical paper discusses numerous techniques and the curation of some of the highest-quality datasets used to train the model. The model is said to excel at complex reasoning capabilities.
In an exclusive interview with AIM, Harkirat Behl, one of the creators of the model, said, “Big models are trained on all kinds of data and store information that may not be relevant.” He added that with sufficient effort in curating high-quality data, it is possible to match the performance levels of these models – and perhaps even surpass them.
For Phi-4, Microsoft has not experimented with inference optimisation, and the focus is mainly on synthetic data. He revealed that once the model architecture is released, developers will be able to optimise it further and quantise it to run it on devices for local use on PCs and laptops.
After Meta, Microsoft is one of the other big companies making significant strides in building open-weight models. Phi-4’s predecessor, Phi-3.5, was also made available for free on Hugging Face.
That said, Meta, or even Microsoft for that matter, isn’t leading the open-source model race; China-based DeepSeek-V3 holds that position for now.
Though a much larger model with 671B parameters, it outperformed Meta’s flagship Llama 3.1 405B parameter model, among many other closed-source models. It is also three times faster than its predecessor, DeepSeek V2.
Behl said that Phi-4 supports ten Indian languages. “I personally made sure and worked hard to get Phi-4 to interpret ten most common Indian languages”. The company is surely betting big on India.
Yesterday, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was in Bangalore for the company’s AI Tour. He announced a $3 billion investment, Microsoft’s largest for the country yet, to expand Azure’s infrastructure in the country. Moreover, the company is set to train 10 million people in AI by 2030 as a part of its ADVANTA(I)GE INDIA initiative.
Last week, Nadella also met Telangana CM A Revanth Reddy in Hyderabad to discuss the state’s technology priorities, including AI, generative AI, and cloud development.
