Microsoft has announced a new multiyear partnership with Mistral, a French AI startup valued at €2 billion. The partnership includes Microsoft taking a minor stake in the company, just over a year after investing in OpenAI. Mistrals open and commercial language models will be available on Microsofts Azure AI platform. The partnership will focus on developing and deploying next-generation large language models. Mistral is releasing a new AI model called Mistral Large, designed to compete with OpenAIs GPT-4 model. Mistrals models, previously open source, will now explore more commercial opportunities with Microsofts support. This partnership comes after a turbulent period for Microsofts main AI partner, OpenAI, providing Microsoft with more visibility into the inner workings of OpenAI. The investment details between Microsoft and Mistral remain undisclosed.
