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Phi-4 Multimodal Instruct

Phi-4 Multimodal Instruct is Microsoft's 5.6B MIT-licensed model for text, image and audio input with a 128K context window.

MultimodalTextImageAudioVideo Free
In plain English

What is this model and why does it matter?

Phi-4 Multimodal Instruct is Microsoft's 5.6B model that handles text, images and audio in one 128K-context model.

Multimodal assistantsVisual question answeringOCR and chartsSpeech recognitionSpeech translationLong-context text
Model overview

Phi-4 Multimodal Instruct: features, use cases and important details

Phi-4 Multimodal Instruct is Microsoft’s compact multimodal Phi model released in February 2025.

Verified model facts

Microsoft documents 5.6B parameters, 128K context, text/image/audio input, text output, MIT licensing and a June 2024 public-data cutoff.

Current status

The checkpoint remains available for local and cloud deployment, with sample supervised fine-tuning workflows for speech and vision.

Best fit

It suits OCR, charts, visual Q&A, speech recognition, speech translation and mixed-modality assistants.

Limitations

It can make visual, speech and factual errors, and modality-specific language support differs.

Get started

How to use this model

  1. Download the official Microsoft checkpoint.
  2. Install the documented Transformers dependencies.
  3. Load the model with trust_remote_code enabled.
  4. Provide text, image and/or audio with the official processor.
  5. Evaluate modality-specific accuracy and latency.
Copy and try

Example prompts

  • Read this chart and explain the main trend.
  • Transcribe and summarize this audio clip.
  • Compare this image with the written specification.
Capabilities

What it can do

  • 128K context
  • Text understanding
  • Image understanding
  • Audio understanding
  • Speech recognition
  • Speech translation
  • Multimodal reasoning
Best for

Practical use cases

  • Visual Q&A
  • Speech workflows
  • Document understanding
  • Multimodal assistants
  • Research
Pricing

What does it cost?

MIT-licensed downloadable checkpoint; no single Microsoft per-token price applies to the model weights.

Simple summaryWeights are MIT licensed. Serving cost depends on GPU hardware and the mix of text, vision and speech inputs.

What stands out

  • MIT license
  • Single model for text, vision and audio
  • 128K context
  • Official fine-tuning examples

Things to consider

  • 5.6B model can trail larger frontier systems
  • Different modalities support different language sets
  • Requires custom model code
Limitations

Important restrictions and trade-offs

  • Static June 2024 knowledge cutoff
  • Can misread images, speech or charts
  • Multimodal input increases serving complexity
SimplifyAITools verdict

Our editorial take

A strong compact open multimodal checkpoint for teams that want text, vision and speech in one self-hostable Microsoft model.

References

Primary sources

  1. Open source 1 ↗
  2. Open source 2 ↗
  3. Open source 3 ↗
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