Mu Reviews

Mu Description

On June 23, 2025, Microsoft unveiled Mu, an innovative 330-million-parameter encoder–decoder language model specifically crafted to enhance the agent experience within Windows environments by effectively translating natural language inquiries into function calls for Settings, all processed on-device via NPUs at a remarkable speed of over 100 tokens per second while ensuring impressive accuracy. By leveraging Phi Silica optimizations, Mu’s encoder–decoder design employs a fixed-length latent representation that significantly reduces both computational demands and memory usage, achieving a 47 percent reduction in first-token latency and a decoding speed that is 4.7 times greater on Qualcomm Hexagon NPUs when compared to other decoder-only models. Additionally, the model benefits from hardware-aware tuning techniques, which include a thoughtful 2/3–1/3 split of encoder and decoder parameters, shared weights for input and output embeddings, Dual LayerNorm, rotary positional embeddings, and grouped-query attention, allowing for swift inference rates exceeding 200 tokens per second on devices such as the Surface Laptop 7, along with sub-500 ms response times for settings-related queries. This combination of features positions Mu as a groundbreaking advancement in on-device language processing capabilities.