Under a new relationship, Microsoft will make the artificial intelligence models developed by French company Mistral AI available through its Azure cloud computing platform, the firms announced on Monday.
In an attempt to draw more users to its Azure cloud services, Microsoft is attempting to offer a wider range of AI models than its largest wager in OpenAI, as seen by the multi-year agreement.
As part of the agreement, Microsoft would acquire a minority share in Mistral, the firm informed Reuters without providing specifics.
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 U.S. 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.
In order to disseminate its models, Mistral has also partnered with Google and Amazon. In the next months, it intends to release Mistral Large on additional cloud platforms, according to a representative.
Timothée Lacroix, Guillaume Lample, and Arthur Mensch, a former researcher at Google’s DeepMind, formed Mistral. They had previously worked on Meta’s artificial intelligence teams.
