Azure Updates: Phi-3; VMs; AI; Latin America market changes

Microsoft hosted its annual Build conference in Seattle, unveiling new details about its products and services. CVP Misha Bilenko shared the introduction of new Phi-3 models. The previously announced Phi-3 small and medium models are available for Azure, along with Phi-3 mini. All three models are also available for Hugging Face, and are optimized to run across a variety of infrastructure such as ONNX Runtime, DirectML, NVIDIA NIM microservices, and Intel accelerators.

“Phi-3 models are the most capable and cost-effective small language models (SLMs) available, outperforming models of the same size and next size up across a variety of language, reasoning, coding, and math benchmarks. They are trained using high quality training data, as explained in Tiny but mighty: The Phi-3 small language models with big potential. The availability of Phi-3 models expands the selection of high-quality models for Azure customers, offering more practical choices as they compose and build generative AI applications,” stated Bilenko.