// Phi · Text LLM
Phi-tiny-MoE-instruct: VRAM & local deployment
3.8B total · 1.1B active (MoE) parameters. About 3.6 GB at 4-bit and 9.4 GB at BF16 with one 8K-token request.
released 2025-06-23licence: Commercial OKmemory figures are estimates
01Specs
| Publisher | Microsoft · microsoft |
|---|---|
| Family / series | Phi · Phi-tiny-MoE |
| Type | Text LLM (text-generation) |
| Parameters | 3.8B total · 1.1B active (MoE) Source: official model card“3.8B total parameters and 1.1B activated parameters” |
| Context length | 4K tokens (4,096)max_position_embeddings in config.json |
| Architecture | 32 layers · GQA · MoE |
| Released weights | BF16 · 7.5 GBdownload |
| Licence | MIT · Commercial OKPermissive licence (Apache-2.0 / MIT / CC-BY / OpenMDW): commercial use allowed. |
| Released | 2025-06-23 (Hugging Face repo created) |
02How much VRAM it needs (estimate)
Total = weights + 10% + 0.5GB overhead + KV cache for one request (FP16 KV). More concurrent users multiply the KV column.
| Precision | Weights | Total @ 8K | Smallest GPU | Mac |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| BF16 / FP16 (original) | 7.6 GB | 9.4 GB | 12GB GPU | Mac 16GB |
| FP8 / INT8 / Q8_0 | 4.0 GB | 5.5 GB | 8GB GPU | Mac 16GB |
| 4-bit (Q4_K_M / AWQ / GPTQ-Int4) | 2.3 GB | 3.6 GB | 8GB GPU | Mac 16GB |
KV cache per request: 8K 0.5 GB
Bits per weight: BF16 16, FP8 8.5, 4-bit 4.85. “Fits” = total ≤ 90% of memory; Mac GPU can use ~2/3 of unified memory (≤36GB) or ~3/4 (larger). For MoE, all experts must be in memory, so size by total parameters. Method →
03How to run it
Only runtimes the publisher or the runtime’s official library names for this model.
- Transformers — mentioned in the official model card
04Official repositories & quantised builds
1 official repo(s) from microsoft.
- Phi-tiny-MoE-instruct Instruct
05Other Phi models
All 18 →| Model | Params | 4-bit total | Released |
|---|---|---|---|
| Phi-4-reasoning-vision-15B | 15.1B | 12.3 GB | 2026-01-23 |
| Phi-mini-MoE-instruct | 7.6B / 2.4B | 6.6 GB | 2025-06-23 |
| Phi-4-mini-flash-reasoning | 3.85B | 4.4 GB | 2025-06-19 |
| Phi-4-mini-reasoning | 3.84B | 4.1 GB | 2025-04-29 |
| Phi-4-reasoning-plus | 14.7B | 12.0 GB | 2025-04-17 |
| Phi-4-reasoning | 14.7B | 12.0 GB | 2025-04-09 |
| Phi-4-multimodal-instruct | 5.57B | 4.2 GB | 2025-02-24 |
| Phi-4-mini-instruct | 3.84B | 4.1 GB | 2025-02-19 |
06Sources
Data checked 2025-12-10. Parameters, context and licence are copied from the official repository; memory figures are our estimates.