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Microsoft has been actively working in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), in collaboration with OpenAI. It has unveiled a range of AI-powered tools, which have been integrated into its products and services.

The tech company recently released its new AI language model ‘Orca’, in partnership with OpenAI. Orca can be optimised for specific tasks and trained using large language models like GPT-4.

Here’s all that you need to know about Orca, which learns by imitating large language models.

What can Orca do?

Orca is a language model that is designed to solve the limitations of smaller models by imitating the reasoning processes of GPT-4. As Orca is smaller in size, it does not require many computing resources to run and operate.

The Orca AI tool is said to be at par with large foundation models (LFM) such as GPT-4. In fact, ever since Microsoft revealed Orca, it has sparked a debate among users as to whether Orca would compete with OpenAI’s popular AI product ChatGPT.

Research has shown that, with the help of GPT-4, Orca is capable of learning explanations, step-by-step thought processes, and other complex instructions.

“Orca is a 13-billion parameter model that learns to imitate the reasoning process of LFMs,” says Microsoft.

That is why Orca is also called Orca 13B–after the number of machine learning parameters it has.

According to Microsoft, Orca has shown impressive results despite being a small model; it is at par with Chat GPT on the Big-Bench Hard (BBH) benchmark and surpasses conventional AI models on BBH and the AGIEval human-centric benchmark. It also demonstrates competitive performance in professional and academic examinations such as SAT, LSAT, GRE, and GMAT.

Will Orca 13B become open source?

Currently, there is no announcement yet from Microsoft on when Orca 13B could become open source, but it could enter the market soon after it proves its capabilities.

Right now, there’s uncertainty around when and whether Orca will become an open-source model for developers to create and train their own models. If Orca does become open source, it could even be enhanced based on user feedback.

Currently, Microsoft is working on multiple AI projects and is investing in AI tools that would enhance its products and services. And the Orca project is a step in that direction.