Microsoft’s AI Language Model, Phi-3 mini: High Performance and Ethical Development

Microsoft has recently released a new AI language model called Phi-3 mini. This latest edition boasts 3.8 billion parameters trained on 3.3 trillion tokens, making it similar in performance to competitor products. The model was evaluated against academic benchmarks and internal testing, and proved its ability to compete with models such as “Mixtral 8x7B and GPT-3.5”.

The Phi-3 mini model achieved a rating of 69 per cent in massive multitask language understanding (MMLU) and 8.38 in multi-turn (MT) benchmarks. Despite its capabilities, the model is limited in size for certain tasks and lacks the capacity to store extensive factual knowledge.

Microsoft developed the Phi-3 mini model using a scaled-up dataset training approach with heavily filtered web and synthetic data, building on the foundation set by Phi-2. The company stressed that the development of this model was done in alignment with their responsible AI principles, with input from internal teams helping to curate additional datasets tailored to address specific insights. This approach resulted in significantly reduced harmful response rates, demonstrating Microsoft’s commitment to ethical AI development.

The Phi-3 mini model is currently available through Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform, providing users with access to its advanced features and capabilities.