Microsoft just launched Phi-4-reasoning-plus, an open-weight 14B model that punches way above its weight. Trained on curated synthetic data and GRPO reinforcement learning, it outperforms DeepSeek-R1-Distill-70B on the AIME 2025 math benchmark. Even better, it drops under a permissive MIT license and supports Ollama and vLLM right out of the box.
Microsoft AI head Mustafa Suleyman is pushing to reduce the company's heavy dependence on OpenAI, actively testing in-house models like Phi-4 inside Copilot. Microsoft wants to trim sky-high Azure compute bills and reclaim its strategic roadmap, but untangling a deeply integrated $13 billion partnership is proving far easier said than done.
Microsoft just released the official weights for its 14B-parameter Phi-4 model on Hugging Face under a permissive MIT license. Previously restricted to the Azure AI Foundry platform, developers can now freely download, fine-tune, and deploy the high-reasoning model locally for commercial applications.
Microsoft just launched Phi-4, its latest 14-billion-parameter small model focused heavily on math problem-solving. Trained on high-quality synthetic and human datasets with fresh post-training tweaks, it takes aim at lightweight rivals like GPT-4o mini and Gemini 2.0 Flash. For now, it is only available for limited research use on Azure AI Foundry.
