Microsoft inks deal with France’s Mistral AI, an OpenAI rival that has its own chatbot
Feb 26, 2024, 11:11 AM | Updated: 11:20 am
FILE - Text from the ChatGPT page of the OpenAI website is shown in this photo, in New York, Feb. 2, 2023. A majority of American adults think artificial intelligence tools will increase the spread of false and misleading information in the 2024 presidential election. That's one of the findings from a new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy. (AP Photo/Richard Drew, File)
(AP Photo/Richard Drew, File)
Microsoft announced an artificial intelligence partnership Monday with the French startup Mistral AI that could lessen the software giant’s reliance on ChatGPT-maker OpenAI for supplying the next wave of chatbots and other generative AI products.
Mistral AI emerged less than a year ago but is already what Microsoft described Monday as an “innovator and trailblazer” at the vanguard of building more efficient and cost-effective AI systems.
Microsoft and Mistral didn’t disclose the financial terms of the deal, though Microsoft said it involves a small investment in the Paris-based startup. That suggests it is far smaller than Microsoft’s investment of billions of dollars into OpenAI, a years-long relationship that has attracted the scrutiny of antitrust regulators in the U.S. and Europe.
We’re announcing a multi-year partnership with @MistralAI, as we build on our commitment to offer customers the best choice of open and foundation models on Azure. https://t.co/k1L7lfFeES
— Satya Nadella (@satyanadella) February 26, 2024
Mistral also on Monday released a public test version of its own chatbot, called Le Chat, that apparently was flooded with so much interest that a company executive said it was temporarily unavailable for part of Monday.
The company also announced its newest large language model, Mistral Large, which it claims is in the same league as 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 has also previously said it is teaming up with other big cloud providers including Amazon and Google.
Mistral made a big splash by attracting big amounts of investor funding to give it a multibillion-dollar valuation just months after it was founded last spring. Its “open-source” approach to developing AI means it publicly releases key components of its models, in contrast to companies such as OpenAI that closely guard them.
Mistral AI announces Mistral Large
top-tier reasoning capacities, is multi-lingual by design, has native function calling capacities and a 32k model.
The pre-trained model has 81.2% accuracy on MMLU pic.twitter.com/wtoDcdSilJ
— AK (@_akhaliq) February 26, 2024
It was started by three French former researchers from Google and Meta: CEO Arthur Mensch, Chief Scientist Guillaume Lample and Chief Technology Officer Timothee Lacroix.
When the European Union last fall was drafting the final version of its Artificial Intelligence Act, a comprehensive set of AI regulations, Mistral pushed back against efforts to impose restrictions on foundation models that power generative AI systems. Mensch took to social media to say the EU’s proposals for a two-tier system would discourage innovative newcomers.
