Microsoft to Ship an On-Device Phi-Silica AI Model With All Copilot+ PCs

Microsoft ships a large language model (LLM) on the device with all Copilot+ computers. The company announced its latest variant of the Phi-3 AI model called Phi-Silica at the Microsoft Build 2024 event. This has now become the fifth variant of Phi-3 and officially the LLM (or SLM ) smallest with only 3.3 billion parameters. This new AI model will now be available locally on all PC parts in the PC Copilot+ AI class. Notably, Microsoft also announced several new AI features for Copilot+ PCs during its Surface event.

The announcement was made by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella during the keynote session at its Build event where the new Phi-Silica AI model was introduced as LLM on the Copilot+ computing device. They will run on the local hardware of the Neural Processing Unit (NPU) equipped in these devices. With only 3.3 billion parameters, the model is relatively smaller than most SLMs. These smaller models are generally better at particular tasks, but lack the general conversational capabilities of LLMs such as OpenAI's GPT-4, Google Gemini 1.5 Pro, or Anthropic's Claude 3.

The development is still considered a major milestone as it is the first time AI models have been added to computers out of the box. Although open source models such as the LLMs released by Mixtral can be downloaded and run locally by enthusiasts, they were not offered from the OEM or OS. With the integration of Phi-Silica into the Windows workflow, it is believed that its functionality will also be optimized.

Speaking with a Microsoft spokesperson, a VentureBeat report noted that Phi-Silica's differentiator is its distinction as the first natively deployed Windows language model. The spokesperson also confirmed that the model is optimized to run on Copilot+ NPU computers and will run relatively lag-free. However, their specific functionalities are not known. In addition, these computers will also be integrated with the Windows Copilot library that will run on servers and provide all current and future Copilot features.

Microsoft also announced the general availability of previously introduced Phi-3 models, as well as a preview of a new Phi-3 vision model, which includes multimodal processing and computer vision capabilities.