Microsoft Joins Forces With Mistral To Boost Azure AI Platform With Advanced Models
Microsoft has formed a new multiyear partnership with Mistral, a French AI startup valued at €2 billion (approximately $2.1 billion), as reported by the Financial Times. This collaboration not only involves Microsoft acquiring a minor stake in the 10-month-old AI company but also follows Microsoft's significant investment of more than $10 billion into its OpenAI partnership just over a year ago. The partnership aims to integrate Mistral's open and commercial language models into Microsoft's Azure AI platform, making Mistral the second company after OpenAI to offer a commercial language model on Azure.
The focus of Microsoft's partnership with Mistral is on the development and deployment of next-generation large language models. In line with this, Mistral has announced the launch of a new AI model, Mistral Large, designed to be a strong competitor to OpenAI's GPT-4 model. However, unlike some of Mistral's previous models, Mistral Large will not be open source. The Mistral AI team boasts, "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)."
Mistral's new offerings also include Mistral Small, which promises improved latency compared to Mistral's 8x7B model, and a conversational chatbot named Le Chat, based on various models from Mistral AI. While Mistral has typically released its models as open source, the partnership with Microsoft opens new commercial avenues for the French AI company. The details of Microsoft's investment in Mistral remain undisclosed.
This strategic investment comes after a tumultuous period for Microsoft's primary AI partner, OpenAI. In a surprising turn of events on November 17, OpenAI's board announced the dismissal of co-founder and CEO Sam Altman, only for Altman to return as CEO shortly after, at the end of November. Amidst these developments, Microsoft secured a nonvoting observer seat on the nonprofit board that oversees OpenAI, thereby gaining increased insight into OpenAI's operations without having a direct say in major decisions.
Microsoft's engagement with Mistral, alongside its ongoing partnership with OpenAI, underscores the tech giant's commitment to advancing AI technologies and its strategic positioning in the competitive landscape of AI development. The collaboration with Mistral not only broadens Microsoft's AI portfolio but also solidifies its presence in the European AI sector.
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