Microsoft launched the next version of its lightweight AI model Phi-3 Mini, the first of three small models the company plans to release. 

• Phi-3 Mini measures 3.8 billion parameters and is trained on a data set that is smaller relative to large language models like GPT-4.
• It is now available on Azure, Hugging Face, and Ollama. Microsoft plans to release Phi-3 Small (7B parameters) and Phi-3 Medium (14B parameters). Parameters refer to how many complex instructions a model can understand. 
• The company released Phi-2 in December, which performed just as well as bigger models like Llama 2.
• Microsoft says Phi-3 performs better than the previous version and can provide responses close to how a model 10 times bigger than it can.