Microsoft invests €2bn in French AI Mistral startup

Microsoft

Microsoft has announced a new multi-year partnership with French artificial intelligence startup Mistral. The terms of the deal were not disclosed. The startup is currently valued at 2 billion euros (about $2.1 billion).

Here's What We Know

As part of the agreement, Microsoft will take a minority stake in 10-month-old Mistral and provide access to its open and commercial language models on Microsoft's Azure AI platform.

This is the second partnership after OpenAI that will allow developers to use exclusive AI models on Azure. As with OpenAI, the collaboration will focus on building advanced language models.

Mistral announced the new Mistral Large model, which is designed to compete with OpenAI's GPT-4 model. Unlike previous Mistral developments, its source code will not be open source.

The company also launched a smaller Mistral Small model with improved latency and a new conversational chatbot, Le Chat, based on various Mistral models.

Source: The Verge