Microsoft’s Strategic Shift: Embracing Smaller Language Models with Phi-2

At Ignite 2023, Microsoft announced the newest iteration of the Phi Small Language Model (SLM) series termed Phi-2. This comes at a time when many industry members are voicing their opinions that smaller models are going to be more useful for enterprises in comparison to Large Language Models (LLMs).  “Microsoft loves SLMs,” said Satya Nadella, Chairman and CEO at Microsoft in the keynote, and added that Phi-2, which has been developed by Microsoft’s Research Wing on highly specialised datasets, can rival models 150 times bigger.  Phi-2 has 2.7 billion parameters and demonstrates state-of-the-art performances against benchmark testing parameters such as common sense, language understanding and logical reasoning. “Phi-2 is open-source and soon will be coming to Microsoft