Yesterday Microsoft announced Copilot+ PC which is a new category of PC with built-in AI capabilities and simultaneously buried the AI PC category which is only a few months old. The advantage of Copilot+ PC is that it is able to process AI functions on the device such as Recall which remembers all the owner's activities over a period of three months.
Many wonder what AI model is used to enable this ability to run directly on a Copilot+ PC. The answer is Phi-Silica's new model with 3.3 billion parameters. This makes it smaller than the Phi-3 Mini for smartphones with 3.8 billion parameters that was announced last April.
All NPU Copilot+ PC processed AI features will use Phi-Silica mode. With its small size, it is able to run the inference process quickly and at low power while not affecting the battery of a laptop.
Phi-Silica is categorized as a Small Language Model (SLM) and is the smallest in the Phi family. Besides Phi-Silica and Phi-3 Mini, there is also Phi-3-Vision with 4.2 billion parameters, Phi-3-Small with 7 billion parameters, and Phi-3-Medium with 14 billion parameters.