Microsoft has a new AI venture in development – this time in
partnership with French AI startup Mistral. It’s a multiyear partnership worth
almost $2.1 billion, where Microsoft is reported to be owning a minor stake in
the company.
As a result of the collaborative efforts between both the companies, Mistral will be offering development and deployment of its open and commercial language models to users of Microsoft’s AI platform Azure.
Mistral is not the first company to have its commercial
language model offered on Azure, though, as Microsoft first partnered with
OpenAI on this front.
Although only a 10-month old startup, Mistral is already
looking like the future of AI. The company has just announced its latest model
called Mistral Large, that could be compared to OpenAI’s GPT-4 model in terms
of its capabilities. The company claims that it is the world’s “second-ranked
model generally available through an API (next to GPT-4)”. Mistral is also launching
a new interactive chatbot called Le Chat, that is based on its various AI models.
