Microsoft and Mistral, a French AI firm worth two billion euros (about $2.1 billion), have launched a new multiyear relationship. Barely a year after Microsoft committed over ten billion dollars to its OpenAI alliance, the Financial Times reported that as part of the partnership, Microsoft will acquire a small ownership in the 10-month-old AI startup.
As a result of the agreement, Mistral is the second startup to launch an officially licensed language model on Azure following OpenAI. It will have both its public and private language models accessible on Microsoft’s Azure AI platform. Microsoft’s collaboration with Mistral, like that of OpenAI, aims to create and implement massive language models for the future generation.
Microsoft Collab With Mistral:
Today, Mistral is introducing Mistral Large, a new AI model. It is intended to compete more directly with the GPT-4 model from OpenAI. Compared to some of Mistral’s earlier models, it will not be open source. According to the Mistral AI team, Mistral Large performs well on widely known standards, ranking it as the second-best model in the world that is usually accessible through an API (after GPT-4).
Mistral Large can be accessed via Azure AI Studio and Azure Machine Learning on Mistral’s infrastructure or hosted in Europe. Today, Mistral Small is going to be accessible. It provides better latency than Mistral’s 8x7B model. Additionally, Mistral is launching Le Chat, a new interactive chatbot built on several Mistral AI models.
Although Mistral has always made its models free, collaborating with Microsoft will allow the French artificial intelligence startup to look into other business prospects. However, both Microsoft and Mistral are revealing information about the investment.
Microsoft’s stake emerged months after OpenAI, its primary AI partner, had a difficult time. Sam Altman, the CEO and co-founder of OpenAI, was unexpectedly dismissed on November 17th. Still, according to the board, he returned to the position a few days later, in the final days of November. Microsoft secured a nonvoting observer position on the nonprofit committee that oversees OpenAI amidst all the disruption, giving the software greater access to its internal operations but denying it the ability to vote on important decisions.
