Microsoft’s most capable new Phi 4 AI model rivals the performance of far larger systems

Microsoft launched several new “open” AI models on Wednesday, the most capable of which is competitive with OpenAI’s o3-mini on at least one benchmark. All of the new pemissively licensed models — Phi 4 mini reasoning, Phi 4 reasoning, and Phi 4 reasoning plus — are “reasoning” models, meaning they’re able to spend more time fact-checking solutions to complex problems. They expand Microsoft’s Phi “small model” family, which the company launched a year ago to offer a foundation for AI developers building apps at the edge. Phi 4 mini reasoning was trained on roughly 1 million synthetic math problems generated by Chinese AI startup DeepSeek’s R1 reasoning model. Around 3.8 billion parameters in size, Phi 4 mini reasoning is designed for educational applications, Microsoft says, like “embedded tutoring” on lightweight devices. Parameters roughly correspond to a model’s problem-solving skills, and models with more parameters generally perform better than those with fewer parameters. Phi ... Read full article.