Devs can now tap Microsoft Edge to power AI web apps

Microsoft is launching new APIs for Edge, its web browser, to let developers incorporate AI functionality into web apps using models built into Edge. Unveiled at Build 2025, the AI APIs mirror some of the functionality in Google Chrome, which also offers “built-in AI” that developers can tap to power their web applications. Microsoft’s move suggests that it’s keen to offer a competitor — one that might sway devs to its side. Edge’s new APIs give websites and Edge browser extensions access to Phi 4 mini, an AI model that Microsoft released in late February. Around 3.8 billion parameters in size, Phi 4 mini excels at math problems, Microsoft says, thanks to a training data set that includes a mix of human-crafted and synthetic data (i.e. data generated by AI models). Parameters roughly correspond to a model’s problem-solving skills, and models with more parameters generally perform better than those with fewer parameters. Small models have the advantage of being more efficient, howeve ... Read full article.