Microsoft has announced a new multi-year partnership with Mistral, a French startup specializing in artificial intelligence. This startup is only 10 months old but is already valued at €2 billion. The companies did not disclose the details of the investment.
The partnership will include Microsoft acquiring a minor stake in the company. This partnership comes just over a year after Microsoft invested more than $10 billion in a partnership with OpenAI. Through this agreement, Mistral’s open source and commercial language models will be available on the Microsoft Azure AI platform. As with OpenAI, Microsoft’s partnership with Mistral will also focus on the development and deployment of large-scale next-generation language models.
At the same time, Mistral announced a new artificial intelligence model called Mistral Large. It is designed to compete more closely with the OpenAI GPT-4 model. Unlike some of Mistral’s previous models, this one will not be offered as open source.
«Mistral Large achieves significant results in standard benchmarks, making it the second model in the world to be available via API (along with GPT-4)», says the Mistral AI team.
Mistral Large is available on Mistral’s own infrastructure hosted in Europe or through Azure AI Studio and Azure Machine Learning. Mistral Small will also be available, offering improved latency compared to the Mistral 8x7B model. Mistral is also releasing a new conversational chatbot, Le Chat, which is based on various Mistral AI models.
Source: The Verge