> This might change in the future but it is the current state
I hope it doesn't change. The focus of a model shouldn't be to embed data. Retrieval is a better method to provide data to a model, and leads to less "sounds smart" but very wrong results.
Having less data embedded also means that the model is more generally usable outside the realm of chat assistants, where you only want the model to be aware about data you provide it. One example could be in games where you might have a medieval fantasy setting, it would be really weird if you could get a character to start talking to you about US politics. That probably still wouldn't work with Phi-2 without fine-tuning (as I imagine it does have some data of US politics embedded), but I hope it illustrates the point.
Having less data embedded also means that the model is more generally usable outside the realm of chat assistants, where you only want the model to be aware about data you provide it. One example could be in games where you might have a medieval fantasy setting, it would be really weird if you could get a character to start talking to you about US politics. That probably still wouldn't work with Phi-2 without fine-tuning (as I imagine it does have some data of US politics embedded), but I hope it illustrates the point.