I went with Phi as the default model because, after some testing, I was honestly surprised by how high the quality was relative to its size and speed. The responses felt better in some reasoning tasks-but were running on way less hardware.

What really convinced me, though, was the focus on the kinds of tasks I actually care about: multi-step reasoning, math, structured data extraction, and code understanding.There’s a great Microsoft paper on this: "Textbooks Are All You Need" and solid follow-ups with Phi‑2 and Phi‑3.