Microsoft and French artificial intelligence (AI) champion Mistral AI have struck a deal which will bring the start-up's new AI model to market, the company announced on Monday.
The Paris-based company unveiled its new large language model (LLM) - the underlying technology that powers generative AI products.
Called Mistral Large, the company says it “reaches top-tier reasoning capabilities,” and is fluent in French, English, German, Spanish and Italian.
Mistral also unveiled its multilingual conversational assistant called Le Chat (the cat), which the 10-month-old company said “is natively multilingual and offers a pedagogical and fun way to explore Mistral AI’s technology”.
The partnership with Microsoft means that Mistral Large will be available to Azure customers, Microsoft’s cloud computing service. The tech giant will also have a minor stake in Mistral, but it has not been disclosed how much.
“This is a significant milestone for us, as the unparalleled performance of this multilingual model will continue to push the boundaries of what is possible with frontier AI,” Arthur Mensch, cofounder and CEO of Mistral AI, said in a press release.
“We are very proud to announce the availability of Mistral Large on Azure AI. Microsoft's trust in our model is a step forward in our journey to put frontier AI in everyone's hands”.
Mistral was valued at around €2 billion in December to reach unicorn status, a company valued at €1 billion.
Microsoft is going big on AI, having already invested $13 billion (€12 billion) in ChatGPT maker OpenAI.
Whereas OpenAI is a closed source AI model, meaning the source code is private, Mistral is mostly open source, meaning the software is free for the public to modify and distribute.
Microsoft is not the only Big Tech company to enter the age of AI. Amazon and Google are also heavily investing in building generative AI.
