In the rapidly evolving landscape of Generative AI, the industry is witnessing a significant shift. While the “bigger is better” mantra once dominated, the tide is turning. As organizations move from experimental pilots to production-grade applications, the focus has shifted toward small language models (SLMs). These models offer lower latency, reduced compute costs, and the ability to run on edge devices, while maintaining performance that rivals massive models like GPT-4 for specific tasks.
Microsoft Azure has positioned itself as a premier destination for these models, offering them through the Model-as-a-Service (MaaS) framework and the Azure AI Model Catalog. In this article, we provide a technical deep dive into three of the most prominent SLMs available on Azure: Microsoft’s Phi-3, Meta’s Llama 3 (8B), and Snowflake Arctic. We analyze their architectures, benchmark performance, deployment strategies, and cost efficiency to help you decide which model best fits your workload.