Microsoft on Wednesday launched several new “open” AI models, the most capable of which is competitive with OpenAI’s o3-mini on at least one benchmark. As it says on the tin, all of the new permissively licensed models — Phi 4 mini reasoning, Phi 4 reasoning, and Phi 4 reasoning plus — are “reasoning” models, meaning they can 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.

Full report : Microsoft releases three Phi-4 reasoning models on Hugging Face, expanding its Phi “small model” family, which it launched in May 2024 for AI app developers.