Orca Series by Microsoft
The Orca Series is Microsoft's family of small language models (SLMs) focused on reasoning-intensive tasks while maintaining high efficiency. Built as research models using synthetic data generated by larger “teacher” models, Orca models demonstrate reasoning capabilities that rival or exceed those of much larger LLMs. They are optimized for use on consumer hardware and provide a lightweight yet powerful foundation for specialized and academic applications.
Current Models in the Orca Series:
Orca 2 (7B and 13B):
Released in late 2023, Orca 2 models are fine-tuned from LLaMA 2 base models and trained with synthetic instruction data to enhance step-by-step reasoning, abstraction, and summarization. Using a technique called “Prompt Erasure,” the models learn to reason independently, rather than simply copying patterns from their training prompts.
Key Features:
Strong performance on reasoning benchmarks compared to models several times larger.
13B model optimized for instruction following, multi-step problem solving, and summarization.
Efficient for deployment on standard consumer GPUs.
Ideal for research settings and reasoning-intensive applications.
Available under a Microsoft Research license for non-commercial use.
Example Use Cases:
Academic research into small model alignment and reasoning.
Lightweight AI applications requiring efficient multi-step logic.
Instructional content generation and summarization in constrained environments.