Microsoft has entered into a multiyear partnership with French AI startup Mistral, which is valued at €2 billion. As part of the partnership, Microsoft will acquire a minor stake in Mistral. This comes just over a year after Microsoft invested over $10 billion in its OpenAI partnership. The deal will involve Mistral’s open and commercial language models being made available on Microsoft’s Azure AI platform. Mistral has announced a new AI model called Mistral Large, which aims to compete with OpenAI’s GPT-4 model. Unlike previous models, Mistral Large will not be open source. It has achieved strong results on benchmarks and is the world’s second-ranked model available through an API. Mistral is also releasing a new conversational chatbot called Le Chat. The partnership with Microsoft allows Mistral to explore more commercial opportunities. The details of the investment have not been disclosed. Microsoft’s investment in Mistral comes after a period of turmoil for its main AI partner, OpenAI. Microsoft now has a nonvoting observer seat on OpenAI’s board, providing more visibility into its operations but no voting power.
