It's no secret that Microsoft goes all-in when it comes to AI. The company has invested heavily in OpenAI and added artificial intelligence to its various products and services, including the introduction of Copilot in Windows 11.
But just because it has invested billions in OpenAI doesn't mean Microsoft is ignoring other players in the AI game, as the tech giant has also invested heavily in French startup Mistral AI.
The multi-year partnership aims to help accelerate innovation in AI and debut Mistral Large on Microsoft Azure. Mistral Large, the company's flagship business model, is a general-purpose language model proficient in code and mathematics and can process dozens of documents in a single call. He speaks French, German, Spanish and Italian, as well as English. According to the most widely used benchmarks, it is the second model in the world generally available through an API, next to GPT-4, so it is easy to understand Microsoft's interest.
Opportunities galore
The alliance between the two companies focuses on three main areas: supercomputing infrastructure, market scaling, and AI research and development. Microsoft will provide an Azure AI supercomputing infrastructure to deliver world-class performance for AI training and inference workloads for Mistral AI flagship models.
Additionally, customers will have access to premium Mistral AI models through Models as a Service (MaaS) in the Azure AI Studio and Azure Machine Learning model catalog. This, along with Azure's AI-optimized infrastructure and enterprise-grade capabilities, provides Mistral AI with additional opportunities to promote, sell, and distribute its models to Microsoft customers around the world.
“We are delighted to embark on this partnership with Microsoft. With Azure's cutting-edge AI infrastructure, we are reaching a new milestone in our expansion by driving our innovative research and practical applications to new customers everywhere. “Together, we are committed to driving impactful progress in the AI industry and delivering unparalleled value to our customers and partners around the world,” said Arthur Mensch, CEO of Mistral AI.
