Microsoft launched several new “open” AI models on Wednesday, the most capable of which is competitive with OpenAI’s o3-mini on at least one benchmark.
All of the new pemissively licensed models — Phi 4 mini reasoning, Phi 4 reasoning, and Phi 4 reasoning plus — are “reasoning” models, meaning they’re able to spend more time fact-checking solutions to complex problems. They expand Microsoft’s Phi “small model” family, which the company launched a year ago to offer a foundation for AI developers building apps at the edge.
Phi 4 mini reasoning was trained on roughly 1 million synthetic math problems generated by Chinese AI startup DeepSeek’s R1 reasoning model. Around 3.8 billion parameters in size, Phi 4 mini reasoning is designed for…