Instructions to use microsoft/phi-4 with libraries, inference providers, notebooks, and local apps. Follow these links to get started.

Libraries

How to use microsoft/phi-4 with Transformers:

# Use a pipeline as a high-level helper
from transformers import pipeline

pipe = pipeline("text-generation", model="microsoft/phi-4")
messages = [
    {"role": "user", "content": "Who are you?"},
]
pipe(messages)

# Load model directly
from transformers import AutoTokenizer, AutoModelForCausalLM

tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("microsoft/phi-4")
model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained("microsoft/phi-4")
messages = [
    {"role": "user", "content": "Who are you?"},
]
inputs = tokenizer.apply_chat_template(
	messages,
	add_generation_prompt=True,
	tokenize=True,
	return_dict=True,
	return_tensors="pt",
).to(model.device)

outputs = model.generate(**inputs, max_new_tokens=40)
print(tokenizer.decode(outputs[0][inputs["input_ids"].shape[-1]:]))

Notebooks
Google Colab
Kaggle
Local Apps

vLLM

How to use microsoft/phi-4 with vLLM:

Install from pip and serve model

# Install vLLM from pip:
pip install vllm
# Start the vLLM server:
vllm serve "microsoft/phi-4"
# Call the server using curl (OpenAI-compatible API):
curl -X POST "http://localhost:8000/v1/chat/completions" \
	-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
	--data '{
		"model": "microsoft/phi-4",
		"messages": [
			{
				"role": "user",
				"content": "What is the capital of France?"
			}
		]
	}'

Use Docker

docker model run hf.co/microsoft/phi-4

SGLang

How to use microsoft/phi-4 with SGLang:

Install from pip and serve model

# Install SGLang from pip:
pip install sglang
# Start the SGLang server:
python3 -m sglang.launch_server \
    --model-path "microsoft/phi-4" \
    --host 0.0.0.0 \
    --port 30000
# Call the server using curl (OpenAI-compatible API):
curl -X POST "http://localhost:30000/v1/chat/completions" \
	-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
	--data '{
		"model": "microsoft/phi-4",
		"messages": [
			{
				"role": "user",
				"content": "What is the capital of France?"
			}
		]
	}'

Use Docker images

docker run --gpus all \
    --shm-size 32g \
    -p 30000:30000 \
    -v ~/.cache/huggingface:/root/.cache/huggingface \
    --env "HF_TOKEN=<secret>" \
    --ipc=host \
    lmsysorg/sglang:latest \
    python3 -m sglang.launch_server \
        --model-path "microsoft/phi-4" \
        --host 0.0.0.0 \
        --port 30000
# Call the server using curl (OpenAI-compatible API):
curl -X POST "http://localhost:30000/v1/chat/completions" \
	-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
	--data '{
		"model": "microsoft/phi-4",
		"messages": [
			{
				"role": "user",
				"content": "What is the capital of France?"
			}
		]
	}'

Docker Model Runner
How to use microsoft/phi-4 with Docker Model Runner:
```
docker model run hf.co/microsoft/phi-4
```

Production deployment and quantization trade-offs

#58

by O96a - opened Mar 28

Discussion

O96a

Mar 28

The 14B parameter count hits a sweet spot for many deployment scenarios — too large for edge but fits comfortably in single-GPU setups. We've been running phi-4 quantized variants in production for RAG pipelines and seeing good results.

One observation: the reasoning benchmarks in the paper are impressive, but I'm curious about real-world instruction following in multi-turn conversations. Have you evaluated degradation across conversation length? In agent workflows we've noticed that some models lose context coherence after 10-15 turns even with proper token limits.

Also, any guidance on optimal quantization choices? AWQ vs GPTQ vs GGUF — the trade-offs between inference speed and quality aren't always clear from the benchmark tables alone.

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