A side-by-side comparison of release history, capabilities, licensing and model sizes.
| Attribute |
 Koala
|
 Phi
|
|---|---|---|
| Developer | BAIR | Microsoft |
| Current generation | – | Phi-4 |
| Initial release | 2023-04-03 | 2023-06-20 |
| Instruct tuned | Yes | Yes |
| Coding | No | Yes |
| Finetuning | Yes | Yes |
| Open source | Yes | Yes |
| License | Noncommercial | MIT |
| Model sizes | 7B, 13B | 3.8B, 5.6B, 14B |
| Links |
Released alongside Vicuna, Koala is one of many descendants of the Meta LLaMA model trained on dialogue data collected from the web. On the developers' benchmarks, Koala outperforms its sibling Alpaca, though its adoption has been significantly less than that of its other sibling, Vicuna. Due to its use of LLaMA, only research use is permitted.
Phi is Microsoft's family of compact open models designed for efficient local and edge deployment. Phi-4 is the current generation.
Microsoft introduced Phi-1 and Phi-2 to demonstrate how carefully curated and synthetic training data can make small models unusually capable. Phi-3 expanded the family for mobile and multimodal use. The Phi-4 generation includes a 14B general model and reasoning variants, plus smaller and multimodal checkpoints. Phi models are released under the MIT license and are designed for research, local inference, and resource-constrained production workloads.