Microsoft announced a new multi-year partnership with French startup Mistral, which specializes in developments in the field of artificial intelligence. This startup is only 10 months old, but is already valued at €2 billion. The companies do not disclose investment details.
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 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 next-generation large 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 previous Mistral models, this one will not be offered as open source.
“Mistral Large achieves significant results in standard benchmarks, making it the world's second API-accessible model (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. The Mistral Small will also be available, offering improved latency over the Mistral 8x7B model. Mistral is also releasing a new conversational chatbot, Le Chat, which is based on various Mistral AI models.