Phi-4 and an rStar-Math paper suggest that compact, specialized models can provide powerful alternatives to the industry’s largest systems.

Microsoft enhances the capabilities of small language models (SLMs) with rStar-Math. The technique boosts the capabilities of SLMs, allowing them to compete or even surpass the math reasoning capability of OpenAI's o1 reasoning model.

A team of math and AI researchers at Microsoft Asia has designed and developed a small language model (SLM) that can be used to solve math problems. The group has posted a paper on the arXiv preprint server outlining the technology and math behind the new tool and how well it has performed on standard benchmarks.