- Microsoft has inked a deal with Mistral AI to develop their upcoming models on Azure. Microsoft is investing about $2 billion in Mistral AI.
- Azure AI Studio now hosts Mistral AI's flagship model, Mistral Large for customers and developers at a cost-effective price.
- Mistral Large is considered a close competitor to OpenAI's GPT-4 model and already rivals models like Gemini 1.0 Ultra and Llama 2.
Microsoft, under the leadership of Satya Nadella, has been growing tremendously. Recently, the Redmond giant became the second company to breach the $3 trillion market value. Many experts are crediting Nadella for his foresight on AI, particularly his early investment in OpenAI. And now, Microsoft has signed a multi-year deal with OpenAI-rival Mistral AI, a nine-month-old French AI startup making huge waves in the open-source space.
Microsoft Invests Over $2 Billion in Mistral AI
According to CNBC, Microsoft is investing over $2 billion in Mistral AI to advance the development of upcoming large language models. Not just that, Mistral AI gets access to Azure’s cutting-edge AI infrastructure, just like OpenAI, to test and deploy new LLMs.
As a result of the partnership, Mistral AI’s newly announced flagship AI model, Mistral Large, is now available on Azure AI Studio for enterprise customers and developers to build new products, besides having access to OpenAI’s GPT-4 model.
Microsoft offers a huge library of proprietary and open-source models on its Azure service for inference, fine-tuning, and evaluation. Now, Mistral Large sits alongside GPT-4 and Llama 2 in Azure AI Studio.
Regarding pricing, Mistral Large is 5x cheaper in input and around 7x cheaper in output, compared to the GPT-4-32k model.
In case you are unfamiliar with Mistral AI, the young European startup with just 34 employees, is considered a close competitor to OpenAI. Their open-source models have shown great promise compared to Google DeepMind’s largest Gemini 1.0 Ultra model and Meta’s Llama 2 model.
Mistral Large has superior reasoning capabilities, supports native function calling, and has a nuanced understanding of various languages, making it a multilingual LLM. Mistral AI says that the model is fluent in English, French, Spanish, German, and Italian languages. It also has a context window of 32K tokens, just like GPT-4.
You can chat with the Mistral Large model on chat.mistralai.ai (visit) without any subscription fee. In my brief testing, I found Mistral Large quite impressive, and the model seems like a great ChatGPT alternative. So what do you think about Microsoft’s new partnership with Mistral AI? Let us know your thoughts in the comment section below.
