The Globe and Mail reports in its Wednesday, April 24, edition that in the race to build generative artificial intelligence systems, the tech industry's mantra has been bigger is better, no matter the price tag. A New York Times dispatch to The Globe reports that now tech companies are starting to embrace smaller AI technologies that are not as powerful but cost a lot less. For many customers, that may be a good trade-off. On Tuesday, Microsoft introduced three smaller AI models that are part of a technology family the company has named Phi-3. Microsoft said even the smallest of the three performed almost as well as GPT-3.5, the much larger system that underpinned OpenAI's ChatGPT chatbot when it stunned the world upon its release in late 2022. The smallest Phi-3 model can fit on a smartphone, so it can be used even if it is not connected to the Internet. As well, it can run on the kinds of chips that power regular computers, rather than more expensive processors made by Nvidia. Because the smaller models require less processing, big tech providers can charge customers less to use them. They hope that means more customers can apply AI in places where the bigger, more advanced models have been too expensive to use.