Microsoft has recently announced its partnership with a French AI startup, Mistral AI. Following the partnership with OpenAI, this deal shows that Microsoft is quite interested in investing in AI. Although Mistral AI is a start-up, it’s already worth a lot about €2 billion (which is roughly $2.1 billion). This can be a really big deal because this is the second time Microsoft has invested that much amount in an AI company like this. Previously Microsoft had invested more than $10 billion in AI tech giant OpenAI.
The best part of this deal is that Mistral’s AI technology, which includes a special AI model called Mistral Large, will be used in Microsoft’s Azure AI platform. This will be the second company to offer a commercial language model on Azure after OpenAI. So, just like the OpenAI partnership, Microsoft’s partnership with Mistral will also be a big step with the main focus on the development and deployment of this next-generation large language model.
Mistral Large is designed to be as good as OpenAI’s GPT-4 model, but it’s not something everyone can use for free because it’s not open-source. Soon, this model and some others from Mistral will be available on Microsoft cloud service. Thus, making it quite easier for people and companies to access and use these advanced AI tools.
As the Mistral AI team said, “ 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)”.
This partnership is focused on three core areas:
Microsoft Supports Supercomputing Infrastructure for Mistral AI
After this partnership, Microsoft will support Mistral AI with Azure AI supercomputing infrastructure. Thus, delivering the finest performance and scale for AI training and inference workload for Mistral AI’s flagship models.
Bringing It to Everyone
Microsoft and Mistral AI are teaming up to offer Mistral’s advanced AI models to users. These models will be available through Le Patforme (Mistral’s AI infrastructure), Azure AI Studio, and Azure Machine Learning. Moreover, if you are using Microsoft Azure, you can easily buy Mistral’s AI models. This Azure powerful AI setup and strong business features give Mistral AI broad areas to share, sell, and get their AI models out to Microsoft’s customers all over the world.
AI Development and Research
Microsoft and Mistral AI will be working together on special projects. They want to create custom AI models for certain customers, focusing on projects in European public sector workloads.
Moreover, Mistral Small is being launched along with Mistral Large with the promise of faster response times compared to its previous 8x7B model. Mistral will soon launch its new Chatbot named Le Chat as well, powered by Mistral AI technologies.
The partnership between Microsoft and Mistral AI is a big step for AI technology. It brings together Microsoft’s large network and Mistral smart AI tools to help more people use advanced AI. This teamwork is going to make new and exciting changes in how we use technology all over the world.