Sébastien Bubeck leads the Machine Learning Foundations group at Microsoft Research. He and his team have released a suite of small language models (SLMs) called “Phi,” the latest of which (Phi-2) matches or outperforms models up to 25x larger. After debuting Phi-2 at the annual NeurIPS machine learning conference, Sébastien sat down with Microsoft CTO and EVP of AI Kevin Scott to discuss Phi-2 and what it suggests for the future of how we build AI models.