List of the Top 20 AI Models for Azure AI Foundry in 2025

Grok-3, developed by xAI, marks a significant breakthrough in the realm of artificial intelligence, aiming to set new benchmarks for AI capabilities. This innovative model is designed as a multimodal AI, allowing it to process and interpret data from various sources, including text, images, and audio, which enhances the interaction experience for users. Built on an unparalleled scale, Grok-3 utilizes ten times the computational power of its predecessor, employing the capabilities of 100,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs within the Colossus supercomputer framework. Such extraordinary computational resources are anticipated to greatly enhance Grok-3's performance in multiple areas, such as reasoning, coding, and the real-time analysis of current events by directly accessing X posts. As a result of these advancements, Grok-3 is set not only to outpace its previous versions but also to compete with other leading AI systems in the generative AI field, which could fundamentally alter user expectations and capabilities within this sector. The far-reaching effects of Grok-3's capabilities may transform the integration of AI into daily applications, potentially leading to the development of more advanced and sophisticated technological solutions in various industries. Additionally, its ability to seamlessly blend information from diverse formats could foster more intuitive and engaging user interactions.

Claude Opus 4, the most advanced model in the Claude family, is built to handle the most complex software engineering tasks with ease. It outperforms all previous models, including Sonnet, with exceptional benchmarks in coding precision, debugging, and complex multi-step workflows. Opus 4 is tailored for developers and teams who need a high-performance AI that can tackle challenges over extended periods—perfect for real-time collaboration and long-duration tasks. Its efficiency in multi-agent workflows and problem-solving makes it ideal for companies looking to integrate AI into their development process for sustained impact. Available via the Anthropic API, Amazon Bedrock, and Google Cloud’s Vertex AI, Opus 4 offers a robust tool for teams working on cutting-edge software development and research.

DeepSeek-R1 represents a state-of-the-art open-source reasoning model developed by DeepSeek, designed to rival OpenAI's Model o1. Accessible through web, app, and API platforms, it demonstrates exceptional skills in intricate tasks such as mathematics and programming, achieving notable success on exams like the American Invitational Mathematics Examination (AIME) and MATH. This model employs a mixture of experts (MoE) architecture, featuring an astonishing 671 billion parameters, of which 37 billion are activated for every token, enabling both efficient and accurate reasoning capabilities. As part of DeepSeek's commitment to advancing artificial general intelligence (AGI), this model highlights the significance of open-source innovation in the realm of AI. Additionally, its sophisticated features have the potential to transform our methodologies in tackling complex challenges across a variety of fields, paving the way for novel solutions and advancements. The influence of DeepSeek-R1 may lead to a new era in how we understand and utilize AI for problem-solving.

Claude Sonnet 4 is a breakthrough AI model, refining the strengths of Claude Sonnet 3.7 and delivering impressive results across software engineering tasks, coding, and advanced reasoning. With a robust 72.7% on SWE-bench, Sonnet 4 demonstrates remarkable improvements in handling complex tasks, clearer reasoning, and more effective code optimization. The model’s ability to execute complex instructions with higher accuracy and navigate intricate codebases with fewer errors makes it indispensable for developers. Whether for app development or addressing sophisticated software engineering challenges, Sonnet 4 balances performance and efficiency, offering an optimal solution for enterprises and individual developers seeking high-quality AI assistance.

Mistral AI has unveiled the Mistral Large 2, an advanced AI model engineered to perform exceptionally well across various fields, including code generation, multilingual comprehension, and complex reasoning tasks. Boasting a remarkable 128k context window, this model supports a vast selection of languages such as English, French, Spanish, and Arabic, as well as more than 80 programming languages. Tailored for high-throughput single-node inference, Mistral Large 2 is ideal for applications that demand substantial context management. Its outstanding performance on benchmarks like MMLU, alongside enhanced abilities in code generation and reasoning, ensures both precision and effectiveness in outcomes. Moreover, the model is equipped with improved function calling and retrieval functionalities, which are especially advantageous for intricate business applications. This versatility positions Mistral Large 2 as a formidable asset for developers and enterprises eager to harness cutting-edge AI technologies for innovative solutions, ultimately driving efficiency and productivity in their operations.

Mistral Small 3.1 is an advanced, multimodal, and multilingual AI model that has been made available under the Apache 2.0 license. Building upon the previous Mistral Small 3, this updated version showcases improved text processing abilities and enhanced multimodal understanding, with the capacity to handle an extensive context window of up to 128,000 tokens. It outperforms comparable models like Gemma 3 and GPT-4o Mini, reaching remarkable inference rates of 150 tokens per second. Designed for versatility, Mistral Small 3.1 excels in various applications, including instruction adherence, conversational interaction, visual data interpretation, and executing functions, making it suitable for both commercial and individual AI uses. Its efficient architecture allows it to run smoothly on hardware configurations such as a single RTX 4090 or a Mac with 32GB of RAM, enabling on-device operations. Users have the option to download the model from Hugging Face and explore its features via Mistral AI's developer playground, while it is also embedded in services like Google Cloud Vertex AI and accessible on platforms like NVIDIA NIM. This extensive flexibility empowers developers to utilize its advanced capabilities across a wide range of environments and applications, thereby maximizing its potential impact in the AI landscape. Furthermore, Mistral Small 3.1's innovative design ensures that it remains adaptable to future technological advancements.

GPT-4.1 is a cutting-edge AI model from OpenAI, offering major advancements in performance, especially for tasks requiring complex reasoning and large context comprehension. With the ability to process up to 1 million tokens, GPT-4.1 delivers more accurate and reliable results for tasks like software coding, multi-document analysis, and real-time problem-solving. Compared to its predecessors, GPT-4.1 excels in instruction following and coding tasks, offering higher efficiency and improved performance at a reduced cost.

GPT-4.1 mini is a more lightweight version of the GPT-4.1 model, designed to offer faster response times and reduced latency, making it an excellent choice for applications that require real-time AI interaction. Despite its smaller size, GPT-4.1 mini retains the core capabilities of the full GPT-4.1 model, including handling up to 1 million tokens of context and excelling at tasks like coding and instruction following. With significant improvements in efficiency and cost-effectiveness, GPT-4.1 mini is ideal for developers and businesses looking for powerful, low-latency AI solutions.

GPT-4.1 nano is a highly efficient, smaller-scale version of the GPT-4.1 model, built for high-speed, low-cost AI applications. It retains the core capabilities of the GPT-4.1 series, including support for a 1 million token context window, but with optimized performance for tasks like classification, search, and autocompletion. Designed to be both affordable and fast, GPT-4.1 nano is perfect for developers and businesses looking for a quick, reliable AI solution that minimizes latency and operational costs.

Mistral Medium 3 is a breakthrough in AI technology, offering the perfect balance of cutting-edge performance and significantly reduced costs. This model introduces a new era of enterprise AI, with a focus on simplifying deployments while still providing exceptional performance. Its ability to deliver high-level results at just a fraction of the cost of its competitors makes it a game-changer in industries that rely on complex AI tasks. Mistral Medium 3 is particularly strong in professional use cases like coding, where it competes closely with larger models that are typically more expensive and slower. The model supports hybrid and on-premises deployments, offering enterprise users full control over customization and integration into their systems. Businesses can leverage Mistral Medium 3 for both large-scale deployments and fine-tuned, domain-specific training, allowing for enhanced efficiency in industries such as healthcare, financial services, and energy. The addition of continuous learning and the ability to integrate with enterprise knowledge bases makes it a flexible, future-proof solution. Customers in beta are already using Mistral Medium 3 to enrich customer service, personalize business processes, and analyze complex datasets, demonstrating its real-world value. Available through various cloud platforms like Amazon Sagemaker, IBM WatsonX, and Google Cloud Vertex, Mistral Medium 3 is now ready to be deployed for custom use cases across a range of industries.

The Grok-3 Mini, a creation of xAI, functions as a swift and astute AI companion tailored for those in search of quick yet thorough answers to their questions. While maintaining the essential features of the Grok series, this smaller model presents a playful yet profound perspective on diverse aspects of human life, all while emphasizing efficiency. It is particularly beneficial for individuals who are frequently in motion or have limited access to resources, guaranteeing that an equivalent level of curiosity and support is available in a more compact format. Furthermore, Grok-3 Mini is adept at tackling a variety of inquiries, providing succinct insights that do not compromise on depth or precision, positioning it as a valuable tool for managing the complexities of modern existence. In addition to its practicality, Grok-3 Mini also fosters a sense of engagement, encouraging users to explore their questions further in a user-friendly manner. Ultimately, it represents a harmonious blend of intelligence and usability that addresses the evolving needs of today's users.

OpenAI's Image Generation API, powered by the gpt-image-1 model, enables developers and businesses to effortlessly integrate high-quality image creation features into their applications and services. This model exhibits exceptional versatility, allowing it to generate images in various artistic styles while faithfully following detailed instructions, drawing from an extensive knowledge base, and accurately representing text, thereby unlocking a multitude of practical applications across different industries. Many prominent companies and innovative startups in sectors such as creative software, e-commerce, education, enterprise solutions, and gaming are already harnessing image generation within their products. It provides creators with the flexibility to delve into a wide array of visual styles and concepts. Users can generate and customize images through simple prompts, refining styles, adding or subtracting elements, expanding backgrounds, and much more, significantly enriching the creative workflow. This functionality not only stimulates innovation but also promotes teamwork among groups aiming for visual brilliance, paving the way for new opportunities in design and artistic expression. Ultimately, the API represents a transformative tool that enhances the way individuals and organizations approach image creation.

Phi-4 is an innovative small language model (SLM) with 14 billion parameters, demonstrating remarkable proficiency in complex reasoning tasks, especially in the realm of mathematics, in addition to standard language processing capabilities. Being the latest member of the Phi series of small language models, Phi-4 exemplifies the strides we can make as we push the horizons of SLM technology. Currently, it is available on Azure AI Foundry under a Microsoft Research License Agreement (MSRLA) and will soon be launched on Hugging Face. With significant enhancements in methodologies, including the use of high-quality synthetic datasets and meticulous curation of organic data, Phi-4 outperforms both similar and larger models in mathematical reasoning challenges. This model not only showcases the continuous development of language models but also underscores the important relationship between the size of a model and the quality of its outputs. As we forge ahead in innovation, Phi-4 serves as a powerful example of our dedication to advancing the capabilities of small language models, revealing both the opportunities and challenges that lie ahead in this field. Moreover, the potential applications of Phi-4 could significantly impact various domains requiring sophisticated reasoning and language comprehension.

Microsoft has unveiled Muse, a groundbreaking generative AI model that is set to revolutionize how gameplay ideas are conceived. Collaborating with Ninja Theory, this World and Human Action Model (WHAM) utilizes data from the game Bleeding Edge, enabling it to understand 3D game environments along with the complexities of physics and player dynamics. This proficiency empowers Muse to produce diverse and coherent gameplay sequences, thereby enhancing the creative workflow for developers. Furthermore, the AI possesses the ability to craft game visuals while predicting controller inputs, thus facilitating a more efficient prototyping and artistic exploration phase in game development. By analyzing over 1 billion images and actions, Muse not only demonstrates its promise for game creation but also for the preservation of gaming history, as it has the ability to resurrect classic titles for modern platforms. Even though it is currently in its early stages and produces outputs at a resolution of 300×180 pixels, Muse represents a significant advancement in utilizing AI to aid in game development, aiming to boost human creativity rather than replace it. As Muse continues to develop, it may pave the way for groundbreaking innovations in gaming and the resurgence of cherished classic games, potentially reshaping the entire gaming landscape.

Magma is a state-of-the-art multimodal AI foundation model that represents a major advancement in AI research, allowing for seamless interaction with both digital and physical environments. This Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model excels at understanding visual and textual inputs and can generate actions, such as clicking buttons or manipulating real-world objects. By training on diverse datasets, Magma can generalize to new tasks and environments, unlike traditional models tailored to specific use cases. Researchers have demonstrated that Magma outperforms previous models in tasks like UI navigation and robotic manipulation, while also competing favorably with popular vision-language models trained on much larger datasets. As an adaptable and flexible AI agent, Magma paves the way for more capable, general-purpose assistants that can operate in dynamic real-world scenarios.

Phi-4-reasoning is a sophisticated transformer model that boasts 14 billion parameters, crafted specifically to address complex reasoning tasks such as mathematics, programming, algorithm design, and strategic decision-making. It achieves this through an extensive supervised fine-tuning process, utilizing curated "teachable" prompts and reasoning examples generated via o3-mini, which allows it to produce detailed reasoning sequences while optimizing computational efficiency during inference. By employing outcome-driven reinforcement learning techniques, Phi-4-reasoning is adept at generating longer reasoning pathways. Its performance is remarkable, exceeding that of much larger open-weight models like DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama-70B, and it closely rivals the more comprehensive DeepSeek-R1 model across a range of reasoning tasks. Engineered for environments with constrained computing resources or high latency, this model is refined with synthetic data sourced from DeepSeek-R1, ensuring it provides accurate and methodical solutions to problems. The efficiency with which this model processes intricate tasks makes it an indispensable asset in various computational applications, further enhancing its significance in the field. Its innovative design reflects an ongoing commitment to pushing the boundaries of artificial intelligence capabilities.

Phi-4-reasoning-plus is an enhanced reasoning model that boasts 14 billion parameters, significantly improving upon the capabilities of the original Phi-4-reasoning. Utilizing reinforcement learning, it achieves greater inference efficiency by processing 1.5 times the number of tokens that its predecessor could manage, leading to enhanced accuracy in its outputs. Impressively, this model surpasses both OpenAI's o1-mini and DeepSeek-R1 on various benchmarks, tackling complex challenges in mathematical reasoning and high-level scientific questions. In a remarkable feat, it even outshines the much larger DeepSeek-R1, which contains 671 billion parameters, in the esteemed AIME 2025 assessment, a key qualifier for the USA Math Olympiad. Additionally, Phi-4-reasoning-plus is readily available on platforms such as Azure AI Foundry and HuggingFace, streamlining access for developers and researchers eager to utilize its advanced features. Its cutting-edge design not only showcases its capabilities but also establishes it as a formidable player in the competitive landscape of reasoning models. This positions Phi-4-reasoning-plus as a preferred choice for users seeking high-performance reasoning solutions.

Phi-4-mini-reasoning is an advanced transformer-based language model that boasts 3.8 billion parameters, tailored specifically for superior performance in mathematical reasoning and systematic problem-solving, especially in scenarios with limited computational resources and low latency. The model's optimization is achieved through fine-tuning with synthetic data generated by the DeepSeek-R1 model, which effectively balances performance and intricate reasoning skills. Having been trained on a diverse set of over one million math problems that vary from middle school level to Ph.D. complexity, Phi-4-mini-reasoning outperforms its foundational model by generating extensive sentences across numerous evaluations and surpasses larger models like OpenThinker-7B, Llama-3.2-3B-instruct, and DeepSeek-R1 in various tasks. Additionally, it features a 128K-token context window and supports function calling, which ensures smooth integration with different external tools and APIs. This model can also be quantized using the Microsoft Olive or Apple MLX Framework, making it deployable on a wide range of edge devices such as IoT devices, laptops, and smartphones. Furthermore, its design not only enhances accessibility for users but also opens up new avenues for innovative applications in the realm of mathematics, potentially revolutionizing how such problems are approached and solved.

Magistral marks the first language model family launched by Mistral AI, focusing on enhanced reasoning abilities and available in two distinct versions: Magistral Small, which is a 24 billion parameter model with open weights under the Apache 2.0 license and can be found on Hugging Face, and Magistral Medium, a more advanced version designed for enterprise use, accessible through Mistral's API, the Le Chat platform, and several leading cloud marketplaces. Tailored for specific sectors, this model excels at transparent, multilingual reasoning across a variety of tasks, including mathematics, physics, structured calculations, programmatic logic, decision trees, and rule-based systems, producing outputs that maintain a coherent thought process in the language preferred by the user, enabling easy tracking and validation of results. The launch of this model signifies a notable shift towards compact yet highly efficient AI reasoning capabilities that are easily interpretable. Presently, Magistral Medium is available in preview on platforms such as Le Chat, the API, SageMaker, WatsonX, Azure AI, and Google Cloud Marketplace. Its architecture is specifically designed for general-purpose tasks that require prolonged cognitive engagement and enhanced precision in comparison to conventional non-reasoning language models. The arrival of Magistral is a landmark achievement that showcases the ongoing evolution towards more sophisticated reasoning in artificial intelligence applications, setting new standards for performance and usability. As more organizations explore these capabilities, the potential impact of Magistral on various industries could be profound.

The Phi-4-mini-flash-reasoning model, boasting 3.8 billion parameters, is a key part of Microsoft's Phi series, tailored for environments with limited processing capabilities such as edge and mobile platforms. Its state-of-the-art SambaY hybrid decoder architecture combines Gated Memory Units (GMUs) with Mamba state-space and sliding-window attention layers, resulting in performance improvements that are up to ten times faster and decreasing latency by two to three times compared to previous iterations, while still excelling in complex reasoning tasks. Designed to support a context length of 64K tokens and fine-tuned on high-quality synthetic datasets, this model is particularly effective for long-context retrieval and real-time inference, making it efficient enough to run on a single GPU. Accessible via platforms like Azure AI Foundry, NVIDIA API Catalog, and Hugging Face, Phi-4-mini-flash-reasoning presents developers with the tools to build applications that are both rapid and highly scalable, capable of performing intensive logical processing. This extensive availability encourages a diverse group of developers to utilize its advanced features, paving the way for creative and innovative application development in various fields.