Verdict
phi-3-small 7.4B leads 5–1 across 6 shared benchmarks.
Llama 3-8B 1 · phi-3-small 7.4B 5 · higher isn't always better — check the caveats below.
Reported scores — protocols may differ. How we compare
Knowledge: Evenly split 1–1 across 2 shared knowledge benchmarks (largest gap: TriviaQA, 67.7 vs 58.1 — single evaluator).
Reasoning: phi-3-small 7.4B leads 2–0 across 2 shared reasoning benchmarks (largest gap: ARC AI2, 87.6 vs 77.07 — single evaluator).
Vendor claims — compare against the measured scores above. A claim is what a developer says about its own model, not an independent measurement.
No vendor claims on file for Llama 3-8B.
General
“Phi-3-Small-8K-Instruct is a 7B parameters, lightweight, state-of-the-art open model”
Reasoning
“Phi-3-Small-8K-Instruct showcased a robust and state-of-the-art performance among models of the same-size and next-size-up”
phi-3-small 7.4B leads 5–1 across 6 shared benchmarks. Llama 3-8B leads 1 benchmark and phi-3-small 7.4B leads 5. Higher isn't always better — see the integrity caveats on each benchmark.
Llama 3-8B and phi-3-small 7.4B have 6 benchmarks in common in our data — those are the only rows where a direct, apples-to-apples comparison is drawn.
phi-3-small 7.4B leads reasoning 2–0.