LANGUAGE MODEL Microsoft Last updated:

Phi-3 Mini Instruct 3.8B

Phi-3 Mini Instruct 3.8B is an API model from Microsoft. It’s positioned for general text tasks—work that benefits from iteration, not just one-shot answers.

Context
4K
Up to 4,096 tokens

Core Capabilities

Long Documents
Handles entire codebases, books, and multi-doc RAG.

Context Window

4k tokens
≈ short doc
4k This model 本模型
32k Long docs 长文档
128k Books 整本书
400k Multi-doc 多文档
1M Codebase 整个代码库
10M

Availability

API
Available
Product / App
Not available
Open Source
Not released
Enterprise
Contact sales

Pricing Model

Pay per token
Input and output billed separately.
Pay-per-token

Capability / Performance

Where this model sits relative to the middle 60% of models in the tree. All scores are 0–10 (higher is better).

Lower 20% Upper 80% This model
Reasoning
AA Intelligence Index · scaled to 10
1.7
5.6
1.4
Coding
SciCode · scaled to 10
1.8
4.3
0.9
Agentic tasks
Terminal-Bench Hard · scaled to 10
0.2
3.6
0.0
Context / memory
Context window size · log-scaled
6.0
9.0
1.0
Lower 20% 20th percentile — 20% of models score below this This model Where the current model lands Upper 80% 80th percentile — only 20% of models score above this Percentile boundaries are computed across every model in the tree that reports the underlying benchmark for each capability.

What it feels like

  • Phi-3-mini (3.8B) runs entirely on a phone yet matches GPT-3.5-class quality on common reasoning benchmarks
  • First widely-deployed open SLM that proved high-quality synthetic + filtered data beats raw scale
  • Outperforms models same-size and one-tier-up on language, reasoning, coding, and math benchmarks

Best use cases

  • On-device / phone / laptop deployments where no GPU is available
  • Edge inference for IoT, mobile apps, offline assistants
  • Reasoning-driven workflows where fine-tuned synthetic data beats general-knowledge breadth

Tools to try

Not ideal for

  • Broad-knowledge chat — limited factual recall by design
  • Multilingual production beyond English

Model Evolution

phi is Microsoft's language model family.

View full evolution tree →