Phi-4-reasoning-vision and the lessons of training a multimodal reasoning model (microsoft.com)

Small local models are the only thing that still have that magic feeling to me. While large models are still useful and impressive, it makes more sense that they are happening on a giant super computer in a datacenter somewhere. But all the intelligence and capability that can run on my mid level gaming PC is astonishing to me.

I'm very happy to read about this progress but I don't find it particularly surprising. The big labs optimize for accuracy/high scores on benchmarks first; I automatically expect that (with some research effort) a model with 100x few parameters can achieve the same scores.