Monday was a big day for announcements from tech giant Microsoft, unveiling new guiding principles for AI governance and a multi-year deal with Mistral AI.
ADVERTISEMENTTech giant Microsoft has unveiled a new set of guiding principles for how it will manage its artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure, further opening access to its technology to developers.
The announcement was made on Monday at the Mobile World Congress technology show in Barcelona, where AI is a key theme of this year’s event.
One of the key elements of its recently released “AI Access Principles” is the democratization of AI through enterprise AI models.
The company said it plans to do this by expanding access to its cloud computing AI infrastructure.
Speaking to Euronews Next in Barcelona, Brad Smith, vice president and president of Microsoft, also said the company wants to make its AI models and development tools more widely available to developers around the world, enabling countries to build their own AI economies.
“I think it’s incredibly important because we’re investing huge amounts of money, frankly, more than any government on the planet, to build AI data centers so that people can use this technology in every country,” Smith said.
“They can create their AI software, their applications, they can use it for businesses, for consumer services, etc.”
The AI Access Principles outline the company’s commitment to open source models. Open source means that the source code is available to anyone in the public domain to use, modify, and distribute.
“Fundamentally, these principles state that we’re not building this just for ourselves. We’re making it accessible to companies around the world so they can invest in their own AI inventions,” Smith told Euronews Next .
“Secondly, we have a set of principles. It’s very important, I think, that we treat people fairly. Yes, when they use this technology, they understand how we make the basic elements available so that they know, they can use it,” he added.
“We’re not going to take the data that they develop for themselves and access it to compete with them. We’re not going to try to force them to reach consumers or their customers only through an app store where We exercise strict control.”
Merger of Mistral AI and European investments
The announcement of its AI governance guidelines comes as the big tech company entered into an agreement with Mistral AIthe French company revealed on Monday, signaling Microsoft’s intention to diversify into the booming AI market beyond its current involvement in OpenAI.
Microsoft has already invested heavily in OpenAI, the creator of the popular AI chatbot ChatGPT. Its $13 billion (€11.9 billion) investment, however, is currently being scrutinized by regulators in the EU, UK and US.
Widely cited as a growing rival to OpenAI, 10-month-old Mistral reached unicorn status in December after being valued at more than €2 billion, well surpassing the billion-euro threshold for consideration.
The new multi-year partnership will see Microsoft give Mistral access to its Azure cloud platform to help bring its large language model (LLM) called Mistral Large.
LLMs are AI programs that recognize and generate text and are commonly used to power generative AI like chatbots.
“Their (Mistral) commitment to fostering the open source community and achieving exceptional performance aligns seamlessly with Microsoft’s commitment to developing reliable, scalable and responsible AI solutions,” wrote Eric Boyd, vice-president. president of Azure AI Platform at Microsoft, in a press release. blog post.
The move is in line with Microsoft’s commitment to open its cloud-based AI infrastructure.
ADVERTISEMENTLast week, in addition to its partnership with Mistral AI, Microsoft committed to investing billions of euros over two years in its AI infrastructure in Europe, including 1.9 billion euros in Spain and 3.2 billion euros in Germany.
