(April 23): Microsoft on Tuesday announced a cost-effective, small language artificial intelligence model that can perform tasks such as content creation and create social media posts while using smaller amounts of data.

The company introduced an AI model called Phi-3-mini, which can outperform models twice its size across a variety of benchmarks that evaluate language, coding and math capabilities, it said in a statement.

Smaller AI models are designed to perform simpler tasks, making it easier for use by companies with limited resources, Microsoft said.

A business could use Phi-3 to summarise the main points of a long document, extract relevant insights and industry trends from market research reports, Microsoft added.

Phi-3-mini will be available immediately on Microsoft cloud service platform Azure's AI model catalog, machine learning model platform Hugging Face, and Ollama, a framework for running models on a local machine, the company said.

Last week, Microsoft invested US$1.5 billion (RM7.2 billion) in UAE-based AI firm G42. It has also previously partnered with French startup Mistral AI to make their models available through its Azure cloud computing platform.