Microsoft has announced a new long-term partnership with the French startup company Mistral in the field of artificial intelligence, which is valued at two billion euros.
Through this agreement, the software giant aims to expand its participation in the rapidly growing industry beyond OpenAI.
The Financial Times reported that the agreement includes Microsoft acquiring a small share in the artificial intelligence company, which was founded 10 months ago, after Microsoft invested over 10 billion dollars in OpenAI about a year ago.
The deal involves Mistral providing large open source and commercial language models through the Microsoft Azure AI platform, making it the second company to offer a commercial model through this platform after OpenAI.
Just as Microsoft’s partnership with Mistral focuses on developing and deploying next-generation large language models, the partnership with OpenAI shares the same characteristics.
Mistral has announced the launch of a new artificial intelligence model called Mistral Large, developed to compete with OpenAI’s GPT-4 model.
Mistral Large will not be available to the public, unlike some previous versions of Mistral, according to the source.
The Mistral artificial intelligence team stated: “Mistral Large delivers strong results according to general usability standards, making it the second model worldwide available publicly through an application programming interface.”
Mistral Large can be accessed through Mistral’s infrastructure or by using Azure AI Studio and Azure Machine Learning.
The company also introduces Mistral Small, a new artificial intelligence model that offers better accessibility than the previously named 8x7B model Mistral.
Mistral is launching an artificial intelligence chatbot named Le Chat, relying on various models.
Previous Mistral models were usually open source, but with the partnership with Microsoft, the French artificial intelligence company can explore new business opportunities.
Microsoft’s investment comes after a tough period for its main artificial intelligence partner OpenAI a few months ago.
OpenAI’s board of directors unexpectedly announced on November 17 the dismissal of CEO Sam Altman, but Altman returned to his position as CEO of the company a few days later at the end of November.
Microsoft succeeded in securing a supervisory seat on OpenAI’s board of directors, with non-voting rights during these disruptions.
This move gives the software giant a broad view of OpenAI’s internal activities without voting rights in important decisions.
