(Reuters) -Microsoft launched a lightweight artificial intelligence model on Tuesday as it looks to attract a broader customer base with cost-effective options.
The new version called Phi-3-mini is the first of three small language models (SLM (NASDAQ:)) to be released by the company, as it bets its future on a technology that is expected to have a broad impact around the world and the way people work.
“Phi-3 isn’t slightly cheaper, it’s dramatically cheaper. We’re talking a 10x cost difference compared to the other models with similar capabilities,” said Sébastien Bubeck, vice president of GenAI research at Microsoft (NASDAQ:). .
SLMs are designed to perform simpler tasks, making them easier to use by companies with limited resources, the company said.
Phi-3-mini will be immediately available on Microsoft’s AI model catalog cloud service platform Azure, the Hugging Face machine learning model platform and Ollama, a framework for running models on a local machine, the company said.
The SLM will also be available on Nvidia (NASDAQ:)’s Nvidia Inference Microservices (NIM) software tool and is also optimized for its graphics processing units (GPUs).
Last week, Microsoft invested $1.5 billion in UAE-based AI company G42. It has also previously collaborated with French startup Mistral AI to make their models available through the Azure cloud computing platform.
