Microsoft Eclipses OpenAI; Signs Multi-Year Deal with Mistral AI

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 hassigneda 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 getsaccess to Azure’s cutting-edge AI infrastructure, just like OpenAI, to test and deploy new LLMs.We’re announcing a multi-year partnership with@MistralAI, as we build on our commitment to offer customers the best choice of open and foundation models on Azure.https://t.co/k1L7lfFeES— Satya Nadella (@satyanadella)February 26, 2024

We’re announcing a multi-year partnership with@MistralAI, as we build on our commitment to offer customers the best choice of open and foundation models on Azure.https://t.co/k1L7lfFeES— Satya Nadella (@satyanadella)February 26, 2024

As a result of the partnership, Mistral AI’s newly announced flagship AI model,Mistral Large, is nowavailable on Azure AI Studio for enterprise customersand 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 alongsideGPT-4and Llama 2 in Azure AI Studio.

Regarding pricing, Mistral Large is5x 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 largestGemini 1.0 Ultramodel and Meta’s Llama 2 model.

Mistral Large hassuperior 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 acontext window of 32K tokens, just like GPT-4.

You can chat with the Mistral Large model onchat.mistralai.ai(visit) without any subscription fee. In my brief testing, I found Mistral Large quite impressive, and the model seems like agreatChatGPT alternative. So what do you think about Microsoft’s new partnership with Mistral AI? Let us know your thoughts in the comment section below.

Arjun Sha

Passionate about Windows, ChromeOS, Android, security and privacy issues. Have a penchant to solve everyday computing problems.

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