Tag
Phi-3 is Microsoft Research's family of small language models aimed at the edge, and it competes directly with Llama 3.2, Gemma 2 and Qwen 2.5. Phi-3-mini holds 3.8B parameters and, quantized to 4 bits, fits in about 2 GB, running on a CPU with a neural accelerator, an integrated GPU or an NPU.
Garnet is the open-source cache server Microsoft Research published in March 2024. Written from scratch in .NET 8, it speaks the Redis wire protocol, so existing clients connect unchanged, and it stores data through a hybrid memory-and-disk backend called Tsavorite. Core-affinity threading is what lets the Garnet cache outrun Redis on many-core hardware.
GraphRAG has been in real enterprise use for over a year: during indexing, an LLM builds a knowledge graph that answers global questions about a corpus well, precisely where classic RAG fails because no single chunk holds the full answer. Here I compare indexing costs, the cases where it pays off, and the hybrid pattern that teams have settled on.
Microsoft 365 Copilot integrates large language models into Word, Excel, Teams, and Outlook to draft, summarise, and analyse data without leaving the usual workflow. It operates inside the tenant's data graph, respects the organisation's existing permissions, and never uses that data to train the base OpenAI or Anthropic model.
