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

Under the stewardship of Satya Nadella, Microsoft has experienced remarkable growth, recently surpassing the $3 trillion market value milestone. Nadella’s visionary approach to AI, highlighted by early investments in OpenAI, has garnered praise from experts. Now, Microsoft has signed a multi-year agreement with Mistral AI, a nine-month-old French AI startup, positioning itself in the open-source AI domain.

Microsoft Invests More Than $2 Billion into Mistral AI

As reported by CNBC, Microsoft is injecting more than $2 billion into Mistral AI to propel the advancement of forthcoming large language models. Additionally, Mistral AI gains access to Azure’s state-of-the-art AI infrastructure, akin to OpenAI, for the testing and deployment of new LLMs.

Thanks to the collaboration, Mistral AI’s latest flagship AI model, Mistral Large, is now accessible on Azure AI Studio for enterprise clients and developers to craft innovative products, alongside gaining access to OpenAI’s GPT-4 model.

Azure’s suite encompasses an extensive array of proprietary and open-source models for inference, fine-tuning, and evaluation. Presently, Mistral Large joins GPT-4 and Llama 2 within Azure AI Studio.

In terms of pricing, Mistral Large offers input costs approximately 5 times lower and output costs around 7 times lower compared to the GPT-4-32k model.

If you’re not acquainted with Mistral AI, the emerging European startup, boasting just 34 employees, is deemed a formidable rival to OpenAI. Their open-source models exhibit significant potential when compared to Google DeepMind’s largest Gemini 1.0 Ultra model and Meta’s Llama 2 model.

Mistral Large showcases advanced reasoning abilities, facilitates native function calling, and boasts a sophisticated comprehension of multiple languages, rendering it a multilingual LLM. According to Mistral AI, the model demonstrates fluency in English, French, Spanish, German, and Italian languages, while also featuring a context window of 32K tokens, akin to GPT-4.

You can engage with the Mistral Large model at chat.mistralai.ai (visit) without any subscription charges. In my initial trials, I found Mistral Large to be remarkably impressive, suggesting it could serve as a compelling alternative to ChatGPT. What are your views on Microsoft’s recent collaboration with Mistral AI? Share your thoughts in the comments below.