(Photo Illustration by Omar Marques/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
In a potential preview of the future, Microsoft’s newest AI model can not only run natively on your PC, but is smart enough to complete tasks for you, like buying products online.
On Monday, the company released the experimental Fara-7B AI model, describing it as Microsoft’s first “agentic” small language model “designed specifically for computer use,” including controlling the mouse and keyboard.
Fara-7B spans 7 billion parameters, making it significantly smaller than OpenAI’s GPT-3 model from 2020, which featured 175 billion parameters. (We don't know the exact parameters of OpenAI's more recent models.) But despite its relatively small size, Microsoft’s experimental model “achieves state-of-the-art performance within its size class and is competitive with larger, more resource-intensive agentic systems that depend on prompting multiple large models,” the company said. This includes outperforming OpenAI’s GPT-4o when it was configured for online browsing.
Microsoft’s new AI model works “by visually perceiving a web page,” enabling it to understand and take actions over a PC’s desktop. “It does not rely on separate models to parse the screen, nor on any additional information like accessibility trees, and thus uses the same modalities as humans to interact with the computer,” Microsoft added.
In a blog post, Microsoft demoed the Fara-7B model by publishing three videos that show it buying a product online, searching for information and summarizing the result, and using online maps to find the distance between two locations.
Fara-7B seems to respond and act slower than a human while requiring the user to approve certain steps, such as entering account login information. Still, the demos offer a glimpse at how future AI models could automate and execute many day-to-day tasks for users as the technologies become smarter.
Microsoft's Copilot assistant for Windows 11 can also act as an “agent” and execute tasks on behalf of the user. The key difference is that Copilot requires an internet connection to the company’s power-hungry data centers. It also needs to collect data from your PC, which can raise privacy concerns, although Microsoft has policies in place to protect user data.
In contrast, Fara-7B can run natively. “This results in reduced latency and improved privacy, as user data remains local,” according to Microsoft. That said, Fara-7B is far from flawless. Microsoft’s own testing found occasional errors with “accuracy on more complex tasks, mistakes in following instructions, and susceptibility to hallucinations.”
It’s why Microsoft is advising interested users to only test the AI model “in a sandboxed environment, monitoring its execution, and avoiding sensitive data or high-risk domains.” The company has also built safeguards into Fara-7B, which will cause it to refuse to execute malicious tasks.
Fara-7B builds off Microsoft’s previous effort to create on-device AI programs. Last year, the company released Phi-3, a chatbot-related AI model small enough that it can be stored on a smartphone.
In the case of Fara-7B, the company is releasing the AI model as a 16.6GB file, which is meant to be used with Magnetic-UI, Microsoft’s AI research testing platform. In addition, the company plans on releasing a Fara-7B model that can run on Windows 11 Copilot+ PCs, which feature dedicated AI processing.