The Sequence Research #515: Punchy Small Models: Phi-4-Mini and Phi-4-Multimodal
A deep dive into the latest edition of Microsoft's amazing small foundation model.
A few months ago, Microsoft releazed Phi-4, the latest version of its marquee small language models (SLMs), demonstrating that carefully curated and synthesized data can enable highly competitive performance despite a smaller number of parameters. Building on the success of the Phi family, Microsoft has just introduced Phi-4-Mini and Phi-4-Multimodal, extending their capabilities to handle vision and audio modalities. Phi-4-Mini is a 3.8-billion-parameter language model that excels in multilingual support, reasoning, and mathematics, with the added functionality of function calling. Phi-4-Multimodal is a multimodal model integrating text, vision, and speech/audio inputs. These models can be deployed on edge devices, enabling generative AI in resource-constrained environments.
