December 18, 2023
1 min read

Microsoft launches robust AI ‘small language model’ for researchers

Phi-2 is an ideal playground for researchers, including for exploration around mechanistic interpretability, safety improvements, or fine-tuning experimentation on a variety of tasks…reports Asian Lite News

Microsoft has released its newest compact “small language model” titled Phi-2 that continues to perform at par or better than certain larger open-source Llama 2 models with less than 13 billion parameters.

Over the past few months, the Machine Learning Foundations team at Microsoft Research has released a suite of small language models (SLMs) called “Phi” that achieve remarkable performance on a variety of benchmarks.

The first model, the 1.3 billion parameter Phi-1 achieved state-of-the-art performance on Python coding among existing SLMs (specifically on the HumanEval and MBPP benchmarks).

“We are now releasing Phi-2, a 2.7 billion-parameter language model that demonstrates outstanding reasoning and language understanding capabilities, showcasing state-of-the-art performance among base language models with less than 13 billion parameters,” the company said in an update.

Phi-2 is an ideal playground for researchers, including for exploration around mechanistic interpretability, safety improvements, or fine-tuning experimentation on a variety of tasks.

“We have made Phi-2 available in the Azure AI Studio model catalog to foster research and development on language models,” said Microsoft.

The massive increase in the size of language models to hundreds of billions of parameters has unlocked a host of emerging capabilities that have redefined the landscape of natural language processing.

However, a question remains whether such emergent abilities can be achieved at a smaller scale using strategic choices for training, e.g., data selection.

“Our line of work with the Phi models aims to answer this question by training SLMs that achieve performance on par with models of much higher scale (yet still far from the frontier models),” said Microsoft.

The company has also performed extensive testing on commonly used prompts from the research community.

“We observed a behaviour in accordance with the expectation we had given the benchmark results,” said the tech giant.

ALSO READ-Microsoft to invest $3.2 bn in UK to drive future AI growth

Previous Story

BNP cannot win public support through arson, says Hasina

Next Story

Bangladesh War of Liberation is bedrock of our ties, says envoy

Latest from Tech LITE

LLMs solve wargaming challenge

Dstl and Frazer-Nash demonstrate how large language models (LLMs) can solve the challenge of getting through large amounts of wargaming data Analysts at the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl) have demonstrated

Apple Appoints Sabih Khan as New COO

Khan will take over from Jeff Williams, who is stepping down from the role this month and will retire later this year…reports Asian Lite News Apple has announced that Sabih Khan, an

EVs Drive Cleaner Cities

Each EV is equipped with GPS tracking for real-time monitoring and efficiently serves the city’s 159.46 square kilometre area The use of electric vehicles (EVs) in household waste collection is ushering in

India’s Digital Decade Rise

Arundhati Bhattacharya, President and CEO at Salesforce-South Asia and recipient of the Padma Shri, sat down with IANS at an event in the capital to reflect on India’s transformation into a digital
Go toTop

Don't Miss

Google to build AI-powered microscope to spot cancer

The AI detects cancer from the glass slide under the

Microsoft mulls more data centres in India

These data centres form an integral part of Microsoft’s goal