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Llama 3.1 vs. Phi

LLM Comparison


Llama 3.1

Llama 3.1

Overview

Llama 3.1 added a 405B flagship model that was the first open-source model competitive with frontier proprietary models, alongside updated 8B and 70B variants with longer context and improved tool use.


Llama 3.1 was a landmark release for open-source AI. The 405B model achieved parity with GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet on many benchmarks, marking the first time an open model reached the proprietary frontier. All models support a 128K token context window, multilingual generation in eight languages, and built-in tool-calling capabilities. The permissive license allows commercial use for most organisations, making Llama 3.1 a popular foundation for fine-tuning and self-hosted deployments.


Initial release: 2024-07-23

Phi

Phi

Overview

Phi is a series of compact language models developed by Microsoft using high-quality synthetic data and curated web content. Phi-3 and Phi-3.5 (2024) significantly raised the bar for small models, with the 3.8B Phi-3 Mini matching much larger open-source models on key benchmarks.


Phi-1 and Phi-2 are 1.3B and 2.7B parameter language models, respectively, developed by Microsoft to demonstrate the ability of smaller language models trained on high-quality data. In April 2024, Phi-3 was released across Mini (3.8B), Small (7B), and Medium (14B) sizes. Phi-3 Mini achieves performance competitive with Llama 3 8B and Mistral 7B at a fraction of the compute, making it ideal for edge and constrained-resource deployments. Phi-3.5 Mini and MoE followed in August 2024 with further improvements.


Initial release: 2023-06-20

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Llama 3.1

Phi

Products & Features
Instruct Models
Coding Capability
Customization
Finetuning
Open Source
License Custom (Commercial OK) MIT
Model Sizes 8B, 70B, 405B 1.3B, 2.7B, 3.8B, 7B, 14B