Microsoft has revealed the newest addition to its Phi family of generative AI models.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Called Phi-4, the model improves in several areas over its predecessors, Microsoft claims, particularly in solving math problems. That\u2019s partly the result of better training data quality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Phi-4 is available in very limited access as of Thursday night only on Microsoft\u2019s recently launched Azure AI Foundry development platform, and only for research purposes under a Microsoft research license agreement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is Microsoft\u2019s latest small language model, coming in at 14 billion parameters in size, and it will compete with other small models such as GPT-4o mini, Gemini 2.0 Flash, and Claude 3.5 Haiku. These smaller AI models are often faster and cheaper to run, and their performance has gradually increased over the last several years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In this case, Microsoft attributes Phi-4\u2019s jump in performance to the use of \u201chigh-quality synthetic datasets\u201d alongside high-quality datasets of human-generated content, and some unspecified post-training improvements.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Many AI labs are looking closely at the innovations they can make around synthetic data and post-training these days. Scale AI\u2019s CEO Alexandr Wang said in a tweet on Thursday that \u201cwe have reached a pre-training data wall,\u201d confirming several reports on the topic in the last several weeks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Notably, Phi-4 is the first Phi-series model to launch following the departure of S\u00e9bastien Bubeck. Previously one of the vice presidents of AI at Microsoft and a key figure in the company\u2019s Phi model development, Bubeck left the company in October to join OpenAI.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Microsoft has revealed the newest addition to its Phi family of generative AI models. Called Phi-4, the model improves in several areas over its predecessors, Microsoft claims, particularly in solving math problems. That\u2019s partly the result of better training data quality. Phi-4 is available in very limited access as of Thursday night only on Microsoft\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1047","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tech"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.timesofmedia.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1047","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.timesofmedia.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.timesofmedia.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.timesofmedia.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.timesofmedia.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1047"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.timesofmedia.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1047\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1048,"href":"https:\/\/www.timesofmedia.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1047\/revisions\/1048"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.timesofmedia.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1047"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.timesofmedia.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1047"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.timesofmedia.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1047"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}