Exciting Update: Abstractive Summarization in Azure AI Language Now Powered by Phi-3.5-mini! 🎉

We’re thrilled to announce that the summarization capability in Azure AI Language service has started transitioning to industry widely accepted Small Language Model (abbr. SLM) and Large Language Model (abbr. LLM) models, starting with transitioning document and text abstractive summarization to Phi-3.5-mini!

Why It Matters

This upgrade marks a significant advancement in fully embracing rapidly evolving Gen AI technologies. It is aligned with our commitment to enabling customers to concentrate on their core business needs while delegating the complex tasks of model maintenance, finetuning and engineering to our services, and interact with our service with strong typed APIs.

We remain committed to updating the base models and ensuring our customers always receive the best performance for summarization tasks, including GPT-4o models and OpenAI’s o3 models. We are confident that this transition will offer significant advantages, and we eagerly anticipate your feedback as we continue to enhance our services.

What Does This Mean for You

• Enhanced Performance: A fine-tuned Phi-3.5-mini model boosted the production performance by 9%. Key highlights include enhanced understanding capability with improved common-sense reasoning, as well as smoother and more reliable summary generation.
• Resource Optimization: By leveraging the compact yet powerful Phi-3.5-mini, we ensure better utilization of resources while maintaining quality, and availability in container.
• More Enterprise and Compliance Features: lower hallucinations, stronger Responsible AI, enhanced scaling support, etc. Notably the new production model largely reduced hallucination by 78%.

Stay tuned for more updates as we continue this transition to all summarization tasks, and bring additional enhancements to our services!

How To Utilize This Advancement

Using it in Cloud, you don’t need to do anything special to benefit from this advancement.  Your document and text abstractive summarization requests will be served with the finetuned Phi-3.5 mini model.

Using container, please download the latest version on the mcr.microsoft.com container registry syndicate. The fully qualified container image name is mcr.microsoft.com/azure-cognitive-services/textanalytics/summarization.

Thank you for your continued trust in our products, and we welcome your feedback as we strive to continuously improve our services.

For more details and resources, please explore the following links:

-           Learn more about our summarization solution in Documentation

-           Get started with the summarization container by visiting Documentation

-           Try it out with AI Foundry for a code-free experience

-           Explore Azure AI Language and its various capabilities in Documentation