In building LLM applications, enterprises often have to create very long system prompts to adjust the model’s behavior for their applications. These prompts contain company knowledge, preferences, and application-specific instructions. At enterprise scale, these contexts can push inference latency past acceptable thresholds and drive per-query costs up significantly. On-Policy Context Distillation (OPCD), a new training framework proposed by researchers at Microsoft, helps bake the knowledge and preferences of applications directly into a model. OPCD uses the model’s own responses during training, which avoids some of the pitfalls of other training techniques. This improves the abilities of models for bespoke applications while preserving their general capabilities. Why long system p [...]
For three years, Microsoft's artificial intelligence story has been inseparable from OpenAI. The partnership — cemented by a cumulative investment exceeding $13 billion — gave Microsoft early [...]
Baseten, the AI infrastructure company recently valued at $2.15 billion, is making its most significant product pivot yet: a full-scale push into model training that could reshape how enterprises wean [...]
Microsoft today announced the general availability of Agent 365 and Microsoft 365 Enterprise 7, two products designed to bring security and governance to the rapidly growing population of AI agents op [...]
Microsoft on Tuesday released Phi-4-reasoning-vision-15B, a compact open-weight multimodal AI model that the company says matches or exceeds the performance of systems many times its size — while co [...]
Training AI reasoning models demands resources that most enterprise teams do not have. Engineering teams are often forced to choose between distilling knowledge from large, expensive models or relying [...]
Microsoft on Wednesday launched three new foundational AI models it built entirely in-house — a state-of-the-art speech transcription system, a voice generation engine, and an upgraded image creator [...]
Microsoft last week took Agent 365, its management platform for AI agents, out of preview and into general availability — a move that signals the software giant believes the governance challenge aro [...]
Microsoft is fundamentally reimagining how people interact with their computers, announcing Thursday a sweeping transformation of Windows 11 that brings voice-activated AI assistants, autonomous softw [...]
AI engineers often chase performance by scaling up LLM parameters and data, but the trend toward smaller, more efficient, and better-focused models has accelerated. The Phi-4 fine-tuning methodology [...]