Microsoft has just revealed a new long-term partnership with Mistral, a French AI startup valued at €2 billion (approximately $2.1 billion). According to the Financial Times, Microsoft will acquire a small ownership stake in Mistral, marking the second AI deal for Microsoft following its $10 billion investment in OpenAI over a year ago.
As part of this collaboration, Mistral’s open and commercial language models will be integrated into Microsoft’s Azure AI platform. This move positions Mistral as the second company, after OpenAI, to offer a commercial language model on Azure. Similar to the OpenAI partnership, Microsoft and Mistral will work together on advancing and deploying next-generation large language models.
Mistral has introduced a new AI model named “Mistral Large,” designed to rival OpenAI’s GPT-4 model. Unlike Mistral’s previous open-source models, Mistral Large will not be open source. The Mistral AI team highlights its strong performance on widely-used benchmarks, making it the world’s second-ranked model available through an API (after GPT-4). Mistral Large can be accessed on Mistral’s infrastructure in Europe or through Microsoft’s Azure AI Studio and Azure Machine Learning. Additionally, Mistral is releasing a new conversational chatbot called “Le Chat,” based on various models developed by Mistral AI.
While Mistral’s models were previously open source, this partnership with Microsoft enables the French AI company to explore more commercial opportunities. However, specific details about the investment from Microsoft remain undisclosed.
This collaboration comes at a time when Microsoft’s primary AI partner, OpenAI, experienced a period of instability. In November, OpenAI’s board announced the abrupt removal of co-founder and CEO Sam Altman, who later returned as CEO at the end of the month. Microsoft, despite the challenges faced by OpenAI, secured a nonvoting observer seat on the nonprofit board overseeing OpenAI. This move grants Microsoft visibility into OpenAI’s operations but without the power to vote on major decisions.
Source: Theverge
