Microsoft has unveiled its latest light AI model called the Phi-3 Mini designed to run on smartphones and other local devices, it revealed in a new research paper. Trained on 3.8 billion parameters, it's the first of three small Phi-3 language models the company will release in the near future. The aim is to provide a cheaper alternative to cloud-powered LLMs, allowing smaller organizations to adopt AI. According to Microsoft, the new model handily outperforms its previous Phi-2 small model and is on par with larger models like Llama 2. In fact, the company says Phi-3 Mini provides responses close to the level of a model 10 times its size. "The innovation lies entirely in our dataset for training," according to the research paper. That dataset is based on the Phi-2 model, but uses "heavily filtered web data and synthetic data," the team states.