Microsoft's $2 billion bet on this AI startup as it looks beyond ChatGPT

One of Microsoft’s earliest — and perhaps most significant — AI investment was in OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. Now, Microsoft has revealed that it is investing in yet another AI company. “Today, we are announcing a multi-year partnership between Microsoft and Mistral AI, a recognised leader in generative artificial intelligence. Both companies are fuelled by a steadfast dedication to innovation and practical applications, bridging the gap between pioneering research and real-world solutions,” said Microsoft in a statement.According to a report by CNBC, Microsoft has invested $2.1 billion in Mistral AI.
What Microsoft aims to do with Mistral AI
The investment in Mistral AI will enable Microsoft to accelerate the development and deployment of their next generation large language models (LLMs) and “represents an opportunity for Mistral AI to unlock new commercial opportunities, expand to global markets, and foster ongoing research collaboration,” noted the company. The investment is more towards Azure and will target business customers.
Microsoft and Mistral AI will make Mistral AI’s premium models available to customers through the Models as a Service (MaaS) in the Azure AI Studio and Azure Machine Learning model catalog. In addition to OpenAI models, model catalog offers a diverse selection of both open-source and commercial models. Furthermore, Microsoft will support Mistral AI with Azure AI supercomputing infrastructure delivering best-in-class performance and scale for AI training and inference workloads for Mistral AI’s flagship models.
Microsoft has also announced that Mistral AI’s flagship commercial model, Mistral Large, will be available first on Azure AI and the Mistral AI platform. Mistral Large is a general-purpose language model that can deliver on any text-based use case thanks to state-of-the-art reasoning and knowledge capabilities. It is proficient in code and mathematics, able to process dozens of documents in a single call, and handles English, French, German, Spanish, and Italian, said Microsoft.