Microsoft has announced a new multi-year partnership with French artificial intelligence startup Mistral, which is valued at €2 billion. According to the source, Microsoft will acquire a small stake in Mistral, and will also make the startup's large language models available open and commercial on its platform Azure.
As with OpenAI, in which Microsoft has invested over $10 billion, the partnership with Mistral involves the development and deployment of large, next-generation language models. Against this background, Mistral officially introduced a new language model, Mistral Large, which was created as an alternative to GPT-4 from OpenAI. By default, the Mistral language model supports context windows of 32K tokens (typically over 20K words in English). In addition to English, Mistral Large supports other languages.
The Mistral Large language model is available through the company's infrastructure, which is located in Europe, as well as through Azure AI Studio and Azure Machine Learning. In addition to this, the Mistral Small model has become available to users, which is a more advanced version of the Mistral 8x7B algorithm.
Today Mistral also launched a chatbot called Le Chat. It is available at chat.mistral.ai. The company warns that this is still a beta version and that “oddities” may occur. Access to the service is free, and users can choose between three different models – Mistral Small, Mistral Large and a prototype called Mistral Next. It's also worth noting that Le Chat cannot access the Internet.
Previously, Mistral language models were open source. However, the partnership with Microsoft will likely allow the French company to reap more benefits. At the moment, Microsoft and Mistral are not disclosing financial details of the partnership agreement.
If you notice an error, select it with the mouse and press CTRL+ENTER.