Microsoft has formed a partnership with Mistral, a new AI company similar to OpenAI.
(Reuters) – Microsoft will make French startup Mistral AI’s artificial intelligence models available through its Azure cloud computing platform under a new partnership, the companies said on Monday.
The multi-year deal is a sign of Microsoft’s efforts to offer a variety of AI models beyond OpenAI’s biggest contribution, as the tech giant looks to attract more customers to its Azure cloud services.
Microsoft will take a minority stake in Mistral as part of the deal, the startup told Reuters without giving details.
Microsoft confirmed its investment in Mistral, but said it has no equity in the company. The technology giant is under regulatory scrutiny in Europe and the US due to its excessive funding in OpenAI.
The Paris-based startup works on open source and proprietary large language models (LLM), similar to the OpenAI pioneered with ChatGPT, which understands and generates text in a human-like manner.
Its latest proprietary model, the Mistral Large, is the first to be available to Azure customers under the partnership. Mistral’s technology is hosted on Microsoft’s cloud computing platform.
Mistral has also partnered with Amazon and Google to share designs. It plans to make Mistral Large available on other cloud platforms in the coming months, the spokesperson said.
Mistral was founded by Timothée Lacroix and Guillaume Lample, who previously worked on Meta’s AI teams; and Arthur Mensch, a former researcher at Google’s DeepMind.
