Databricks invests in Mistral and announces collaboration with AI
Databricks has announced a new strategic partnership and investment in Mistal AI, one of the most intriguing generative AI startups today.
The pair say their collaboration will focus on integrating Mistal AI’s open models into the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform, providing customers with improved accessibility and flexibility.
The news comes shortly after Brad Smith, vice chairman and president of Microsoft, confirmed a “multi-year partnership” between the Redmond company and Mistral AI.
Databricks and Mistral AI
Mistral’s models are now integrated within the Databricks platform, meaning customers can view and use them in the Databricks Marketplace.
“We are excited to forge this strategic alliance with Databricks, reaffirming our shared commitment to the portability, openness and accessibility of generative artificial intelligence for all,” said Arthur Mensch, CEO of Mistral AI.
As part of the collaboration, two flagship models were introduced: Mistral 7B and Mistral 8x7B. The first is a compact transformer model trained with a context length of 8k and seven billion parameters.
Mistral 8x7B is a sparse mixture of experts (SMoE) trained with a context length of 32k and 45 billion parameters. It can also handle English, French, Italian, German and Spanish.
The French startup’s models can be found on Databricks’ Marketplace, where they can be deployed with Mosaic AI Model Serving, batch-inferenced with Spark and model-inferenced in SQL.
Prem Prakash, Head of AI/ML Product Marketing at Databricks, added: “Now we’re offering a streamlined experience that makes it even easier for customers to natively access, customize, use Mistral AI models for their generative AI applications. implement and manage. .”
Precise details of the investment have been kept secret, but the fact that Mistral AI has already attracted the attention of Microsoft, a company that has invested billions in OpenAI, is important news.