Microsoft Announces Open Sourcing of the Highly Anticipated Phi-4 Model Under MIT License for Commercial Use
Brook.X
Microsoft has previously launched the newest version of its artificial intelligence model series — the Phi-4 model, initially exclusive to Microsoft's new Azure AI Foundry development platform. This exclusivity limited direct access to the model for most users.
In their eagerness to use this model, some even resorted to finding and publishing pirated weights of the Phi-4 model online. As a result, Microsoft has decided to open source the model, eliminating the necessity for developers to rely solely on the Azure AI Foundry platform.
Shital Shah, Microsoft AI's chief research engineer, posted on X/Twitter:
"The launch of phi-4 has been met with an overwhelming response, which took us by surprise. Many have been requesting the weights, and some have even uploaded pirated phi-4 weights on HuggingFace.
Well, wait no more. Today, we are releasing the official version of the phi-4 model on HuggingFace under the MIT license."
The MIT license is very permissive, meaning it’s available for individuals, developers, researchers, and businesses for commercial use. The open-source version provided by Microsoft offers full access to 140B parameters, allowing for testing and deployment without the resource constraints typically associated with large AI systems.
