Microsoft will ship the Phi-Silica AI model on-device with all Copilot+ computers

Microsoft ships the Large Language Model (LLM) on-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 smallest LLM (or SLM) with only 3.3 billion parameters. This new AI model will now be available locally within each PC part of the Copilot+ AI PC class. Notably, Microsoft also announced several new AI features for Copilot+ computers during its Surface event.

The announcement was made by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella during the keynote session of the Build event where the new Phi-Silica AI model was introduced as an LLM on the Copilot+ computing device. They will run on the local Neural Processing Unit (NPU) hardware equipped with these devices. With only 3.3 billion parameters, the model is relatively smaller than most SLMs. Such smaller models are generally better in terms of specific tasks, but do not have the general conversational capabilities of LLMs such as OpenAI GPT-4, Google Gemini 1.5 Pro, or Anthropic’s Claude 3.

The development is still considered a major milestone as this is the first time that AI models have been added to computers immediately after they are ready. Although open source models are available for enthusiasts to download and run locally, such as the LLMs released by Mixtral, they were not offered by OEMs or operating systems. Since Phi-Silica is integrated into the Windows workflow, it is believed that its functionality will also be optimized.

Speaking to a Microsoft spokesperson, the VentureBeat report states that Phi-Silica’s differentiation is its distinction as the first natively implemented Windows language model. The spokesperson also confirmed that the model has been optimized to run on NPU’s Copilot+ computers and will run relatively lag-free. However, its specific functions are not known. Furthermore, these computers will also be integrated with the Windows Copilot library that will run on the servers and offer all existing and future Copilot features.

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