What is the Phi-3.5 series, Microsoft’s newly launched trio of smaller AI models?

Microsoft has released a new batch of lightweight AI models that are open-source and said to be better than Google’s Gemini 1.5 Flash and Meta’s Llama 3.1 as well as OpenAI’s GPT-4o (in some ways).

The Phi-3.5-mini-instruct, Phi-3.5-Mixture of Experts (MoE)-instruct, and Phi-3.5-vision-instruct, are the latest additions to the tech giant’s family of small-language models (SLMs) known as the Phi-3 series. The Phi-3-mini, Microsoft’s first SLM, made its debut in April this year.