Microsoft on Wednesday launched several new “open” AI models, the most capable of which is competitive with OpenAI’s o3-mini on at least one benchmark. As it says on the tin, all of the new permissively licensed models — Phi 4 mini reasoning, Phi 4 reasoning, and Phi 4 reasoning plus — are “reasoning” models, meaning they can spend more time fact-checking solutions to complex problems. They expand Microsoft’s Phi “small model” family, which the company launched a year ago to offer a foundation f...