Tech giant Microsoft will help French AI startup Mistral to bring its technology to the market. Microsoft took according to the Financial Times a small stake in Mistral, but no financial details were provided about the agreement involving both companies announced on Mondaybrought outside.
With the multi-year partnership, Microsoft, like tech giants Google and Amazon, is further immersing itself in the fast-growing sector. The deal makes Mistral’s language models available on Microsoft’s Azure AI platform. Mistral is the second AI company that Microsoft has invested in in a short time. Microsoft previously invested around 13 billion dollars (approximately 12 billion euros) in San Francisco-based OpenAI. Arthur Mensch, co-founder and CEO of Mistral, calls the deal “a step forward in our journey to put groundbreaking AI in everyone’s hands.”
Mistral was founded ten months ago and specializes in text-generating models. It mainly used so far open sourcemodels, which means that anyone can access and adopt the underlying technology. With the collaboration with Microsoft, Mistral can now develop more commercial activities. On Monday it also launched a new AI model, Mistral Largewhich will compete with OpenAI’s GPT4 model and a chatbot, Le Chat.
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