Phi vs. Qwen

Overview

Phi is a series of compact language models developed by Microsoft using textbooks and synthetic data.

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. Despite its size and not having an instruct finetuned counterpart, the Phi-2 model is well-suited to research and experimentation given its size and MIT license.

Initial release: 2023-06-20

Reference

https://ai.azure.com/explore/models/microsoft-phi-2/version/4/registry/azureml-msr

Further Reading

• https://huggingface.co/microsoft/phi-2
• https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.11644

Overview

Qwen is Alibaba Cloud's family of large language models, including chat models, code models, and multimodal variants. Qwen 3 and QwQ are the latest releases, with strong reasoning capabilities.

Qwen (formerly Tongyi Qianwen) is a comprehensive family of large language models developed by Alibaba Cloud. The series includes base models, chat models, code-specific variants (CodeQwen), and multimodal models (Qwen-VL). Qwen models excel at multilingual tasks and have become particularly popular in Asia. The latest releases include Qwen 3 and QwQ (focused on reasoning), competing effectively with Western counterparts while offering strong Chinese language support.

Initial release: 2023-09-13

Reference

https://qwenlm.github.io/

Further Reading

• https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.16609
• https://huggingface.co/Qwen