Paris-based Mistral AI, a company specialised in generative artificial intelligence, on Monday, February 26th, announced its flagship product — Mistral Large, a language model designed to rival top-tier models like OpenAI’s GPT-4.
Mistral Large is a closed-source model that developers can access through Mistral’s API platform.
“Mistral Large achieves strong results on commonly used benchmarks, making it the world’s second-ranked model generally available through an API (next to GPT-4),” says the company.
It is proficient in code and mathematics, able to process dozens of documents in a single call, and handles French, German, Spanish, and Italian (in addition to English).
Alongside Mistral Large, the company also released a new optimised model — Mistral Small, optimised for latency and cost.
Mistral Small outperforms Mixtral 8x7B and has lower latency, which makes it a refined intermediary solution between our open-weight offering and our flagship model.
Mistral x Microsoft: What’s the deal
On February 27, Mistral announced that it has partnered with Microsoft to provide developers with greater access to its technology. As part of this partnership, Mistral will be bringing both its open and commercial models to Azure.
As a result, Azure customers will have the option to access Mistral’s models through Azure’s model catalog, providing them with a wide range of AI solutions to choose from.
In return, Microsoft will support Mistral by providing hardware and infrastructure from its cloud computing platform to train and run its future systems.
Microsoft’s partnership with Mistral AI is focused on three core areas:
- Supercomputing infrastructure: Microsoft will support Mistral AI with Azure AI supercomputing infrastructure for AI training and inference workloads for Mistral AI’s flagship models.
- Scale to market: Microsoft and Mistral AI will make Mistral AI’s premium models available to customers through the Models as a Service (MaaS) in the Azure AI Studio and Azure Machine Learning model catalogue. Customers can now purchase Mistral AI’s models using Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment (MACC). Azure’s AI-optimized infrastructure and enterprise-grade capabilities provide Mistral AI with additional opportunities to sell and distribute its models to Microsoft customers worldwide.
- AI research and development: Microsoft and Mistral AI will explore collaboration around training purpose-specific models for select customers, including European public sector workloads.
€15M investment
Microsoft has also invested €15M in Mistral AI as part of their partnership. This investment is in addition to the Series A funding round that Mistral AI announced in December 2023.
During its Series A funding round, Mistral was valued at €2B led by investors such as Andreessen Horowitz and Lightspeed.
However, Microsoft later clarified that this investment will automatically convert into equity in Mistral’s next funding round, reports Reuters.
European Commission’s scrutiny
Nonetheless, the European Commission, responsible for regulating competition in the European Union, has taken a keen interest in the investment deal between Microsoft and Mistral AI.
As part of its ongoing scrutiny procedure, the EC will analyse the details of the partnership and assess its potential impact on competition and innovation in the AI market.
Previously, the French government and Mistral lobbied for looser regulation in the EU’s AI Act, arguing stricter laws would disadvantage European startups.
Consequently, some lawmakers have raised concerns about the motives of the French company in partnering with Microsoft.
Nevertheless, the French government denied any prior knowledge of the agreement.
“Yesterday, we learned of the technological partnership between Mistral and Microsoft. It’s great news that a young French company has joined Microsoft’s previously exclusive partnership with OpenAI on its Azure platform,” a French finance ministry official told Reuters.
It is not the first time for the tech giant, as it has already invested $13B into OpenAI and faced similar scrutiny. Later, Microsoft clarified they don’t own a controlling stake. The European Commission announced that it is considering reviewing the partnership even after the initial agreement.
Last year, Mistral signed a partnership with Google Cloud.
Under this non-exclusive agreement, Mistral AI will distribute its open weights and optimised proprietary language models utilising Google Cloud’s AI-optimised infrastructure.
Mistral AI: Developing generative AI
Founded by Timothée Lacroix, Guillaume Lample, and Arthur Mensch, Mistral AI specialises in generative artificial intelligence.
The company aims to develop new models of generative artificial intelligence for companies, combining scientific excellence, an open-source approach, and a socially responsible vision of technology.
Read the orginal article: https://siliconcanals.com/news/microsoft-invests-15m-in-mistral-ai/
