Microsoft on Monday announced an artificial intelligence partnership with French startup Mistral AI. This could reduce the software giant’s dependence on ChatGPT maker OpenAI to power the next wave of chatbots and other generative AI products.
Microsoft on Monday announced an artificial intelligence partnership with French startup Mistral AI. This could reduce the software giant’s dependence on ChatGPT maker OpenAI to power the next wave of chatbots and other generative AI products.
Mistral AI was introduced less than a year ago, but it has already become what Microsoft described on Monday as an “innovator and trailblazer” that is pioneering the creation of more efficient and cost-effective AI systems. Masu.
Microsoft and Mistral did not disclose financial terms of the deal, but Microsoft said it included a small investment in the Paris-based startup. That dwarfs the billions Microsoft has invested in his OpenAI, a long-standing relationship that has come under intense scrutiny from U.S. and European antitrust regulators.
Mistral also released a public test version of its chatbot, Le Chat, on Monday, but apparently received so much interest that company executives said it was temporarily unavailable for part of Monday.
The company also announced its latest large-scale language model, Mistral Large. This is on par with competitors such as OpenAI’s GPT-4, Anthropic’s Claude 2, and Google’s Gemini Pro, and will be available on Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing platform. Mistral previously said it would also partner with other major cloud providers, including Amazon and Google.
Mistral made headlines last spring after it raised a huge amount of investor capital and was valued at billions of dollars in just a few months after its founding. The company’s “open source” approach to AI development means it releases key components of its models publicly, in contrast to companies such as OpenAI, which keep them heavily guarded.
It was founded by three French ex-researchers at Google and Meta. CEO Arthur Mensch, Principal Scientist Guillaume Lample, and Chief Technology Officer Timothee Lacroix.
Last fall, as the European Union was drafting the final version of its comprehensive AI regulation, the Artificial Intelligence Act, Mistral opposed efforts to impose limits on the underlying models that power generative AI systems. Mensch argued on social media that the EU’s two-tier system proposal would discourage innovative new entrants.
