This is a radical shake-up for the company that released software that is partially open source, meaning the software is free to modify and distribute to the public.
ADVERTISEMENTFrench champion of artificial intelligence (AI) Mistral AI has unveiled a new extended language model (LLM) intended to rival OpenAI’s ChatGPT, it announced Monday.
Called Mistral Large, the company claims to “achieve high-level reasoning skills” and be fluent in French, English, German, Spanish and Italian. But LLM, the underlying technology that powers generative AI products, will be available to Microsoft customers as the two companies announced a partnership on Monday.
This is a radical shake-up for the company that released software that is partially open source, meaning the software is free to modify and distribute to the public.
Mistral AI’s first model open sourced its model weights – the numerical parameters that influence an AI model’s performance – but not the data or the training process.
But this will not be the case for Mistral Large, which will be available to Azure customers, Microsoft’s cloud computing service. The tech giant will also hold a minor stake in Mistral, but the amount has not been disclosed, according to the Financial Times.
When asked if the company was changing its open source business model, Mistral co-founder Arthur Mensch said in an interview with the The world: “We started with open source models, which anyone can deploy for free because it is a way to disseminate them widely and create demand.
“But from the start, we provided a cost-effective model with optimized (most powerful) models.”
He added that the “commercial activity” will allow the company “to fund the costly research required to develop the model.”
Mistral also unveiled its multilingual conversational assistant called Le Chat, which the 10-month-old company says “is natively multilingual and offers an educational and fun way to explore Mistral AI technology.”
The company has released a beta version of Le Chat, which anyone can try for free right now. Users can try three different models: Mistral Small, Mistral Large and Mistral Next.
“This is an important milestone for us, as the unparalleled performance of this multilingual model will continue to push the boundaries of what is possible with cutting-edge AI,” said Arthur Mensch, co-founder and CEO of Mistral AI , in a press release.
“We are very proud to announce the availability of Mistral Large on Azure AI. Microsoft’s confidence in our model is a step forward in our journey to putting cutting-edge AI into everyone’s hands.
Founded by former employees of DeepMind and Meta from Google, Mistral was valued in December at around 2 billion euros to reach unicorn status, a company valued at 1 billion euros.
Microsoft is betting big on AI, having already invested 13 billion dollars (12 billion euros) in the creator of ChatGPT, OpenAI.
Microsoft isn’t the only big tech company entering the AI era. Amazon and Google are also investing heavily in creating generative AI.
This article has been updated to add context on the Mistral/Microsoft partnership.
