Microsoft Partners With OpenAI's French Rival Mistral to Make Its AI Models Available on Azure

The multi-year deal signals Microsoft's efforts to offer a variety of AI models beyond its biggest bet in OpenAI.

By Reuters | Updated: 27 February 2024 15:21 IST

Microsoft Partners With OpenAI's French Rival Mistral to Make Its AI Models Available on Azure

Photo Credit: Reuters

Microsoft will take a minority stake in Mistral as part of the deal

Highlights

Microsoft said it holds no equity in Mistral AI
Mistral AI works on open source and proprietary LLMs
Microsoft is under regulatory scrutiny over outsized funding in OpenAI

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 signals Microsoft's efforts to offer a variety of AI models beyond its biggest bet in OpenAI as the tech giant seeks to attract more customers for its Azure cloud services.

Microsoft will take a minority stake in Mistral as part of the deal, the startup told Reuters without disclosing details.

[Sponsored] Samsung Galaxy S24: The Ultimate Camera Phone With Smarter On-Device AI

Microsoft confirmed its investment in Mistral, but said it holds no equity in the company. The tech giant is under regulatory scrutiny in Europe and the US for its outsized funding in OpenAI.

The Paris-based startup works on open source and proprietary large language models (LLM), similar to the one OpenAI pioneered with ChatGPT, that understands and generates text in a human-like fashion.

Its latest proprietary model, Mistral Large, will be first available to Azure customers under the partnership. Mistral's technology will be hosted on Microsoft's cloud computing platform.

Microsoft Copilot Gets AI Image Editing Capabilities, Design Tweaked

Mistral has also been working with Amazon and Google to distribute its models. It plans to make Mistral Large available on other cloud platforms in the next few months, a spokesperson said.

Mistral was founded by Timothée Lacroix and Guillaume Lample, who previously worked on Meta's artificial intelligence teams; and Arthur Mensch, a former researcher at Google's DeepMind.

© Thomson Reuters 2024

Is the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 5 the best foldable phone you can buy in India right now? We discuss the company's new clamshell-style foldable handset on the latest episode of Orbital, the Gadgets 360 podcast. Orbital is available on Spotify, Gaana, JioSaavn, Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music and wherever you get your podcasts.

Affiliate links may be automatically generated - see our ethics statement for details.

Comments

For the latest tech news and reviews, follow Gadgets 360 on X, Facebook, WhatsApp, Threads and Google News. For the latest videos on gadgets and tech, subscribe to our YouTube channel. If you want to know everything about top influencers, follow our in-house Who'sThat360 on Instagram and YouTube.