Could this be bigger than OpenAI? Microsoft invests billions in French startup – Mistral AI is a multilingual maestro that’s almost as good as ChatGPT 4
It’s no secret that Microsoft is all-in when it comes to AI. The company has invested heavily in OpenAI and added artificial intelligence to its various products and services, including the introduction of Copilot in Windows 11.
But just because it has invested billions in OpenAI doesn’t mean Microsoft is ignoring other players in the AI game, as the tech giant has now also invested heavily in French startups. Mistral AI.
The multi-year partnership aims to accelerate AI innovation and introduce Mistral Large on Microsoft Azure. Mistral Large, the company’s flagship commercial model, is a general-purpose language model that is adept at code and math and can process dozens of documents at once. In addition to English, it also covers French, German, Spanish and Italian. According to commonly used benchmarks, this is the world’s second model to be widely available via an API, next to GPT-4, so it’s easy to understand Microsoft’s interest.
Opportunities abound
The alliance between the two companies focuses on three core areas: supercomputing infrastructure, market scaling and AI research and development. Microsoft will provide the Azure AI supercomputing infrastructure to deliver peak performance for AI training and inference workloads for Mistral AI’s flagship models.
Additionally, customers can access Mistral AI’s premium models through Models as a Service (MaaS) in the Azure AI Studio and Azure Machine Learning model catalog. This, combined with Azure’s AI-optimized infrastructure and enterprise-grade capabilities, provides Mistral AI with additional opportunities to promote, sell and distribute its models to Microsoft customers around the world.
“We are excited to enter into this partnership with Microsoft. With Azure’s advanced AI infrastructure, we’re reaching another milestone in our expansion, driving our innovative research and real-world applications to new customers everywhere. Together, we are committed to driving impactful progress in the AI industry and delivering unparalleled value to our customers and partners worldwide, said Arthur Mensch, Chief Executive Officer of Mistral AI.