Microsoft Partners with Mistral for Second AI Deal Outside OpenAI

Microsoft continues to expand its investments in artificial intelligence and has announced a new agreement, going beyond its partnership with OpenAI. This time, Microsoft has signed a multi-year partnership with French artificial intelligence startup Mistral, valued at 2 billion Euros (about $2.1 billion). According to the Financial Times report, within the scope of this partnership, Microsoft will take a small stake in this artificial intelligence company, which is only 10 months old. This step stands out as Microsoft’s second major move, following its partnership with OpenAI, in which it invested more than $10 billion.

Agreement, Mistral’in It involves using open and commercial language models on Microsoft’s Azure AI platform, and Azure’da making it the second company to offer a commercial model. OpenAI Similar to the partnership, the collaboration between Microsoft and Mistral will focus on the development and distribution of the next generation of large language models.

Mistral, Today Mistral Large
announced a new AI model called. This model is based on OpenAI’s
GPT-4 It was designed to compete more closely with its model. Unlike Mistral’s previous models, this model will not be open source. “The Mistral Large achieves strong results on widely used standards and is the world’s second-ranked model to be generally available via API, after GPT-4,” states the Mistral AI team.

Microsoft Partners with Mistral for Second AI Deal Outside OpenAI

Mistral Large, It will be available on Mistral’s own infrastructure in Europe or via Azure AI Studio and Azure Machine Learning. The Mistral Small will also be available today and will offer improved latency over Mistral’s 8x7B model. Mistral, Mistral AI’nin a new chatbot based on various models of Le Chat’i also puts it on the market.

Mistral’in Its models have generally been open source, but the partnership with Microsoft gives the French artificial intelligence company the ability to explore further commercial opportunities. Details of the investment are neither available to Microsoft nor Mistral
Not disclosed by.

Microsoft’s investment, main AI partner
OpenAI It came after a difficult period for . on November 17 OpenAI The board of directors abruptly announced the firing of co-founder and CEO Sam Altman, but Altman returned as OpenAI CEO on November 30. During all this turmoil, Microsoft gained a non-voting observer seat on the nonprofit board that controls OpenAI. This is the software giant OpenAI provided greater visibility into its inner workings but major decisions
on did not give voting rights.