Microsoft partners with French start-up Mistral for advanced AI models
Microsoft has teamed up with Mistral, a French AI start-up, in a multiyear partnership. The collaboration will make Mistral's open and commercial language models available on Microsoft's Azure AI platform. Mistral, a 10-month-old AI company, is valued at around $2.1 billion. As per the Financial Times, Microsoft will take a minor stake in Mistral but details of the investment remain undisclosed. This comes after Microsoft's massive $10 billion investment in OpenAI last year.
Mistral's new AI model competes with GPT-4
Mistral has introduced a new AI model called Mistral Large, which aims to compete with OpenAI's GPT-4 model. "Mistral Large achieves strong results on commonly used benchmarks, making it the world's second-ranked model generally available through an API (next to GPT-4)," said the company. Unlike some previous models, Mistral Large won't be open source. The company is also launching a new conversational chatbot called 'Le Chat,' based on various Mistral AI models.
Availability and commercial opportunities
Users can access Mistral Large on Mistral's own infrastructure in Europe or through Azure AI Studio and Azure Machine Learning. Mistral Small is also available now, offering better latency than Mistral's 8x7B model. The partnership with Microsoft opens up more commercial opportunities for the French AI company.
