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Taking another important step in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), Microsoft announced that it has established a strategic and multi-year partnership with the French artificial intelligence (AI) startup Mistral. This collaboration provides a platform that will enable both companies to move forward in the field of AI technologies. Mistral stands out as a company with a market value of approximately 2 billion Euros ($2.1 billion) and a rapidly rising company in the industry.
Details of Microsoft and Mistral partnership
It was reported that Microsoft will take a minority stake in Mistral within the scope of this partnership. Since this development comes after Microsoft invested more than $10 billion with OpenAI, it shows that the company is diversifying and strengthening its investments in the AI field.
The partnership includes the delivery of Mistral’s open and commercial language models on Microsoft’s Azure AI platform. Thus, Mistral will be the second company to offer a commercial language model on Azure. The Microsoft and Mistral collaboration will focus on the development and distribution of the next generation of large language models.
Mistral announced a new AI model called Mistral Large on Tuesday. This model was designed to compete more closely with OpenAI’s GPT-4 model. Unlike Mistral’s previous models, the Mistral Large will not be open source. “Mistral Large achieves strong results on widely used benchmarks and is the world’s second-ranked model publicly available via API (behind GPT-4),” says the Mistral AI team.
Mistral is also launching a new chatbot, Le Chat, based on various models of Mistral AI. While Mistral’s models have generally been open source, the partnership with Microsoft allows the French AI company to explore more commercial opportunities. Although the details of the investment have been disclosed by neither Microsoft nor Mistral, it is clear that this collaboration offers significant opportunities for both companies.
This investment by Microsoft comes after a difficult period with its main AI partner OpenAI. After November 17, when OpenAI’s board of directors announced the dismissal of co-founder and CEO Sam Altman, Altman returned as OpenAI CEO in late November. During this turmoil, Microsoft gained an observer seat that gave OpenAI more visibility into its inner workings but no voting rights on major decisions. These developments further reinforce Microsoft’s strategic moves in the field of AI and its position in the industry.