Microsoft doesn't stop and after its commitment to OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, continues its acceleration in the world ofartificial intelligence with a new investment this time in Mistral AI, a French startup that is establishing itself as a European point of reference in the sector of generative artificial intelligence, strongly supported by President Macron.
The agreement was announced by Mistral AI on Monday 26 February. While financial details of the deal are still scarce, the Financial Times reports that Microsoft will commit to supporting the company in deploying its artificial intelligence models. This could include the integration of language models of Mistral in the Azure AI platform from Microsoft, allowing developers to access these resources through cloud services. Moreover, the American giant will acquire a stake in the Paris-based company, located at Station F.
Microsoft and Mistral Ai: a strategic partnership
The agreement was defined as a strategic “partnership”. for both companies. For Microsoft, it represents a further expansion in the field of artificial intelligence, after the 13 billion invested in OpenAi while for Mistral AI signifies a recognition of its leading position in the industry.
The Parisian startup, founded less than a year ago, aspires to become a European leader in the artificial intelligence sector. Backed by the French government and valued at more than $2 billion, its success highlights Paris' growing role as a European technology hub.
Mistral AI recently announced the launch of its most powerful model to date, Mistral Large, designed for compete with GPT-4 by OpenAI. This model, while not as open source as some of its predecessors, promises excellent performance on significant benchmarks and will be made available via Azure AI Studio and Azure Machine Learning, in addition to Mistral's European infrastructure.
The collaboration between Microsoft and Mistral will not only foster the development and implementation of advanced language models, but could also help strengthen ties between the American company and European authorities, considering the attention of regulators towards recent agreements in the artificial intelligence sector.
“This agreement represents an important step forward in our commitment to bring next-generation artificial intelligence into the hands of everyone,” he said Arthur Mensch, CEO and founder of Mistral AI.
“This is one of the most important days in terms of Microsoft technology support for Europe“, declared the president of the Redmond house, Brad Smith. “We are essentially agreeing to a long-term partnership with Mistral AI so that they can train and deploy their next-generation models for artificial intelligence on our AI datacenters, on our infrastructure, effective immediately.”
“It is important for us to demonstrate that it's not just Microsoft's technology, it's not just about American products. It will be a driver for technology, innovation and growth in Europe too,” said Smith. “I think Europe wants, needs and deserves a broad range of offerings.”
At a time when innovation and technological growth play an increasingly central role in the global landscape, the partnership between Microsoft and Mistral promises to advance the front of artificial intelligence and contribute to the progress of the entire European technology industry emerging.
The Mistral project, the French "champion".
Macron wants France to become a leader in AI, aiming to create hubs of global excellence with significant investments. Therefore, the French president immediately showed great interest in Mistral with the aim of creating global technological champions. “In the artificial intelligence sector – Macron explained in a tweet – I want France to be a champion and position itself at the forefront of this new industrial revolution”.
At its debut Mistral raised 105 million euros. After further financing of 400 million euros in December, the company is now valued at around 2 billion euros. Even prominent personalities in technology and finance, such as Eric Schmidt of Google and Xavier Niel of Iliad, believe in its potential.
Mistral was founded by three young people from Meta and Google: Timothée Lacroix, 31, and Guillaume Lample, 32, who both have work experience at Facebook, and by Arthur Mensch, 30, a former employee of DeepMind, a affiliated with Google.
Mistral develops large language models for generative artificial intelligence. Unlike OpenAI, its models are “open source”, unlike GPT-4, which is considered a closed system where the data and source code are not accessible to third parties.
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