Today in Science, from Wired.

This episode is brought to you by ShipStation. You know, some things take a lot of work. Like sending little robots to far off distant planets. And just as that's challenging, so too, is running a successful e-commerce business. Especially when there's so much to do. So I want to introduce you all to ShipStation. Now I love using ShipStation because it's easy to use Dashboard, which makes managing orders and printing labels, help a breeze, and super smooth. Oh, and the customer service is just out of this world. It's exactly what you need to help grow your business. Sign up for your free 60-day trial at shipstation.com slash tech news. That's shipstation.com slash tech news.

This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Forget the frustration of picking commerce platforms when you switch your business to Shopify. The global commerce platform that supercharges you're selling wherever you sell. With Shopify, you'll harness the same intuitive features, trusted apps, and powerful analytics used by the world's leading brands. Sign up today for your $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com slash tech. All lowercase. That's Shopify.com slash tech.

When chat GPT was released in November, 2023, it could only be accessed through the cloud because the model behind it was downright enormous. Today, we're running a similar capable AI program on a MacBook Air, and it isn't even warm. The shrinkage shows how rapidly researchers are refining AI models to make them leaner and more efficient. It also shows how going to ever larger scales isn't the only way to make machines significantly smarter. The model now infusing the laptop with chat GPT-like wit and wisdom is called Phi3 Mini. It's part of a family of smaller AI models recently released by researchers at Microsoft. Although it's compact enough to run on a smartphone, we tested it by running it on a laptop and accessing it from an iPhone through an app called Enchanted that provides a chat interface similar to the official chat GPT app. In a paper describing the Phi3 family of models, Microsoft's researchers say the model I used measures up favorably to GPT 3.5, the open AI model behind the first release of chat GPT. That claim is based on measuring its performance on several standard AI benchmarks designed to measure common sense and reasoning. In our own testing, it certainly seems just as capable. Microsoft announced a new multi-modal Phi3 model capable of handling audio, video, and text at its annual developer conference, Build this Week. That came just days after OpenAI and Google both touted radical new AI assistants built on top of multi-modal models accessed via the cloud. Microsoft's Lilapution family of AI models suggests it's becoming possible to build all kinds of handy AI apps that don't depend on the cloud. That could open up new use cases by allowing them to be more responsive or private. Offline algorithms are a key piece of the recall feature Microsoft announced that uses AI to make everything you ever did on your PC searchable. The large language models like OpenAI's GPT-4 or Google's Gemini that power chat bots and other services are typically spoon fed huge gobs of text, siphoned from books, websites, and just about any other accessible source. Although it's raised legal questions, OpenAI and others have found that increasing the amount of text fed to these models and the amount of compute power used to train them can unlock new capabilities.

When you need meal time inspiration, it's worth shopping bakers where you'll find over 30,000 mouth-watering choices that excite your inner foodie. And no matter what tasty choice you make, you'll enjoy our everyday low prices, plus extra ways to save, like digital coupons worth over $600 each week. You can also save up to $1 off per gallon at the pump with fuel points. More savings and more inspiring flavors make shopping bakers worth it every time. Bakers, fresh for everyone, fuel restrictions apply.

Bubeck, who is interested in the nature of the intelligence exhibited by language models, decided to see if carefully curating the data fed to a model could improve its abilities without having to balloon its training data. Last September, his team took a model roughly 1 17th the size of OpenAI's GPT-3.5, trained it on textbook quality synthetic data generated by a larger AI model, including factoids from specific domains, including programming. The resulting model displayed surprising abilities for its size.