Skip to main content

Phi-4: Microsoft's Small Language Models with Advanced Reasoning

· 2 min read
Alexander Carrington
Alexander Carrington
COO of Neuronic AI
Phi-4

🧠 Microsoft Launches Phi-4 Reasoning Models​

Microsoft has released Phi-4-reasoning, Phi-4-reasoning-plus, and Phi-4-mini-reasoning — marking a new era for small language models. These 14B and 3.8B parameter models achieve performance comparable to much larger models through advanced reinforcement learning and inference-time scaling.

🚀 Key Features of Phi-4

  • Advanced Reasoning
    → Inference-time scaling for complex multi-step problems
    → Chain-of-thought reasoning with detailed explanations
    → Trained on high-quality reasoning demonstrations

  • Exceptional Efficiency
    → Phi-4-reasoning: 14B parameters rivaling much larger models
    → Phi-4-mini-reasoning: 3.8B parameters for edge deployment
    → Lower computational costs and faster inference

  • Superior Performance
    → Better than OpenAI o1-mini and DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama-70B
    → AIME 2025: 78% (Phi-4-reasoning-plus) vs DeepSeek-R1's performance
    → Outperforms models 5x larger on reasoning benchmarks

  • Open Weight Models
    → MIT license for maximum deployment flexibility
    → Available on Azure AI Foundry and Hugging Face
    → No licensing fees for commercial use

  • Multiple Variants
    → Phi-4-reasoning: Base 14B reasoning model
    → Phi-4-reasoning-plus: Enhanced with RL for higher accuracy
    → Phi-4-mini-reasoning: Compact 3.8B model for resource-constrained environments

📡 Performance & Benchmarks

  • Mathematical Excellence
    → AIME 2024: 75.3% (reasoning), 81.3% (reasoning-plus)
    → GPQA Diamond: 65.8% (reasoning), 68.9% (reasoning-plus)
    → OmniMath: 76.6% (reasoning), 81.9% (reasoning-plus)

  • Coding Capabilities
    → HumanEvalPlus: 92.9% (reasoning), 92.3% (reasoning-plus)
    → Strong performance on programming tasks
    → Effective code generation and debugging

  • General Reasoning
    → Excellent instruction following and alignment
    → Strong performance across diverse problem types
    → Effective multi-step problem decomposition

🛠️ Available now — plug in, route smart, and start building see it on our 👉 Dashboard

Learn more: Microsoft Azure Phi-4 Blog