microsoft/Phi-3-mini-4k-instruct-gguf (via) Microsoft’s Phi-3 LLM is out and it’s really impressive. This 4,000 token context GGUF model is just a 2.2GB (for the Q4 version) and ran on my Mac using the llamafile option described in the README. I could then run prompts through it using the llm-llamafile plugin.
The vibes are good! Initial test prompts I’ve tried feel similar to much larger 7B models, despite using just a few GBs of RAM. Tokens are returned fast too—it feels like the fastest model I’ve tried yet.
And it’s MIT licensed.
Recent articles
- Highlights from my appearance on the Data Renegades podcast with CL Kao and Dori Wilson - 26th November 2025
- Claude Opus 4.5, and why evaluating new LLMs is increasingly difficult - 24th November 2025
- sqlite-utils 4.0a1 has several (minor) backwards incompatible changes - 24th November 2025