Microsoft launches lightweight AI model that can run on smartphones - Times of India

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Microsoft

launched the next-generation of its lightweight

AI model

that can run on smartphones. Called

Phi-3 Mini

, it is the first of three small models the company plans to release, and it is claimed to offer performance levels on par with

GPT-3.5

that powers the free version of ChatGPT.

"The innovation lies entirely in our dataset for training, a scaled-up version of the one used for phi-2, composed of heavily filtered web data and synthetic data," Microsoft said in a research paper.

"The model is also further aligned for robustness, safety, and chat format."

As per Microsoft, Phi-3 performs better than the previous version and can provide responses close to how a model 10 times bigger than it can. The company also aims to launch Phi-3-small and Phi-3-medium that are said to be "significantly more capable than Phi-3-mini".

Phi-3-mini is now available on Microsoft cloud service platform Azure's AI model catalogue, machine learning model platform Hugging Face, and Ollama, a framework for running models on a local machine.

Smaller AI models are aimed at companies with limited resources. A business could use Phi-3 to summarise the main points of a long document, extract relevant insights and industry trends from market research reports, Microsoft said.

Competition with Google

Google launched Gemini in three tiers in December. The smallest model of the group -

Gemini Nano

- was rolled out to Pixel 8 Pro smartphones and later to Samsung Galaxy S24 series. The model is so lightweight that smartphones can process data locally without sending it to a server. Recently,

Google

announced that it will roll out Gemini Nano to the Pixel 8 smartphones.