Microsoft has announced a multiyear partnership with Mistral, a €2 billion French AI startup. According to the Financial Times, the partnership will include Microsoft taking a minor stake in the 10-month-old AI company, just over a year after investing more than $10 billion in its OpenAI partnership.
Mistral’s open and commercial language models will now be available on Microsoft’s Azure AI platform, making it the second company to do so after OpenAI. Similar to the OpenAI partnership, Microsoft’s collaboration with Mistral will focus on the development and deployment of next-generation large language models.
What is the Mistral AI model?
Mistral is introducing a new AI model today called Mistral Large. It is intended to compete more closely with OpenAI’s GPT-4 model. Unlike some of Mistral’s previous models, it will not be open-source. “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),” according to the team behind Mistral AI.
Mistral Large is available on Mistral’s infrastructure, which is hosted in Europe, or via Azure AI Studio and Azure Machine Learning. Mistral Small will also be available today, providing lower latency than Mistral’s 8x7B model. Mistral is also releasing Le Chat, a new conversational chatbot built on various Mistral AI models.
Mistral’s models have traditionally been open source, but the partnership with Microsoft allows the French AI company to explore new commercial opportunities. However, neither Microsoft nor Mistral have disclosed the details of the investment.
Microsoft’s investment comes after a difficult period for its main AI partner, OpenAI. On November 17th, OpenAI’s board abruptly announced that co-founder and CEO Sam Altman had been fired; however, Altman returned as OpenAI CEO just days later, at the end of November. Despite the turmoil, Microsoft was able to secure a nonvoting observer seat on the nonprofit board that oversees OpenAI, giving the software giant more insight into the organization’s inner workings but no voting power on major decisions.
Microsoft’s Mistral AI deal should be further investigated: EU lawmaker
Microsoft’s partnership with French tech startup Mistral AI should be investigated further, according to one of the lawmakers in charge of drafting the European Union’s landmark AI Act.
Microsoft told Reuters that it had invested in the company but did not own any equity. The announcement has raised concerns in Brussels.
Throughout the AI Act negotiations, Mistral lobbied for looser rules for some models, with supporters warning that strict rules would undermine European companies’ ability to compete with big tech.
