Microsoft is trying to expand its presence in the artificial intelligence market by developing smaller and more affordable models. To oversee these efforts, the company created a task force (GenAI).
The new AI production team will focus on building small language models (SLMs) similar to OpenAI's GPT-4, but optimized to require lower computing power and of course operational cost.
The GenAI team will be headed by Microsoft Corporate Vice President Misha Bilenko. It will be part of the Azure cloud segment. In addition, the company has reassigned several senior AI developers from its research team to support this effort.
Microsoft had previously revealed the Phi-2 model, which has around 3 billion parameters and is reportedly superior to other larger scale projects. Experts then praised the performance of the model that Microsoft was able to create with high-quality data sets on which to train its new model.
