OpenAI and GPT-4 were not enough, Microsoft invested in Mistral AI, which notably developed Mistral Large, one of the best generative AI models on the market.
Microsoft announces a “multi-year partnership” with Mistral AI, a French start-up specializing in artificial intelligence. The American firm will inject money and make its cloud infrastructures available to allow Mistral AI to continue to grow. She therefore enters the capital of the company, taking a minority stake.
Mistral AI, more than a challenger
“This partnership with Microsoft allows Mistral AI to access Azure’s cutting-edge AI infrastructure, accelerate the development and deployment of their next generation Large Language Models (LLM), represents an opportunity for Mistral AI to unlock new business opportunities and expand into global markets »rejoices Microsoft in a press release.
Mistral Large is already considered to be one of the most efficient large language models on the market. It would be, according to standard benchmarks, in second position in the ranking, behind GPT-4, but ahead of Claude 2 and Gemini Pro.
Mistral AI will be able to take advantage of Azure optimized servers to train its models, continue its good momentum, and hope to compete with the heavyweights in the sector.
Synergies between Microsoft and Mistral AI
The most advanced Mistral AI models will also be released to Azure AI Studio and Azure Machine Learning customers, allowing them to achieve much greater visibility. The start-up has developed both premium proprietary models, which are paid, as well as free open source models.
For Microsoft, this partnership is a new opportunity to confirm its domination in the field of generative AI. Its investments in OpenAI already give it a certain lead over its competitors, and Mistral AI becomes a new string to its bow.
Mistral Large is for example a reference for the French, Spanish, German and Italian languages, while GPT-4 is especially efficient in English. Microsoft also offers itself privileged access to an infrastructure hosted within the EU, an important argument today for consumers, and even more so the European authorities.
Mistral AI is taking the opportunity to launch La Plateforme, a service for creating applications based on its models, for developers. For users, the start-up deploys Le Chat, a ChatGPT-style conversational agent.
Source : Microsoft
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