((Automated translation by Reuters, please see disclaimer https://bit.ly/rtrsauto)) by Yuvraj Malik and Krystal Hu
Microsoft MSFT.O will make artificial intelligence models from French startup Mistral AI available to its cloud computing platform Azure as part of a new partnership, the two companies announced Monday.
The multi-year deal signals Microsoft’s efforts to offer a variety of artificial intelligence models beyond its biggest bet in OpenAI, as the tech giant seeks to attract more customers for its computing services in Azure cloud.
As part of the announcement, Microsoft MSFT.O will take a minority stake in Mistral AI, the startup confirmed to Reuters, without disclosing details.
The Paris-based startup is working on proprietary and open source language models (LLMs), similar to the one OpenAI has developed with ChatGPT, which understands and generates text in the manner of a human.
Mistral’s latest model, Mistral Large, will first be available to Azure customers as part of the partnership. Azure customers will be able to use several of Mistral’s AI models, the technology of which will also be hosted on Microsoft’s cloud computing platform.
Mistral has also worked with Amazon AMZN.O and Google to distribute its models. The company plans to make Mistral Large available on other cloud computing platforms in the coming months, according to a spokesperson.
The Paris-based company was founded by Timothée Lacroix and Guillaume Lample, who previously worked on Meta’s artificial intelligence teams, and Arthur Mensch, who was a researcher at Google’s DeepMind GOOGL.O.