After OpenAI, Microsoft Sets Sights on Mistral AI with Strategic Partnership
Tech giant Microsoft has partnered with French AI startup Mistral AI to make large language models and AI tools available on its Azure platform. As part of this multi-year partnership, Microsoft has taken a small minority stake in Mistral AI and made an initial financial investment to support the company's development, signaling a strategic move to diversify its AI offerings.
Microsoft has entered into a multi-year partnership with the French artificial intelligence specialist, Mistral AI. This collaboration is a key part of Microsoft's strategy to broaden the AI capabilities offered on its Azure cloud computing platform, extending beyond its significant investments in OpenAI. The agreement makes Mistral AI's models, both open-source and commercial, available through Azure's AI infrastructure and includes an initial financial investment from Microsoft.
Mistral AI's large language models (LLMs), like those developed by OpenAI, are capable of understanding and generating human-like text. Mistral's flagship proprietary model, Mistral Large, became the first of its models to be available to Azure customers through the Models-as-a-Service (MaaS) offering. While the technology will be hosted on Microsoft's cloud platform, Mistral AI intends to make its models available on other cloud platforms in the future as well. Mistral was founded by individuals with previous experience at Meta's AI teams and Google's DeepMind, bringing significant expertise to the rapidly growing company.
The partnership announced in February 2024 included an initial financial investment from Microsoft amounting to €15 million (approximately $16.3 million). This investment aims to support Mistral AI's commercial growth, market expansion, and potentially fund research and development into AI models specifically for European public services. Alongside the partnership, Mistral AI also introduced its own ChatGPT-style language chatbot called "Le Chat".
Microsoft's investment and partnership with Mistral AI come at a time when the tech giant faces regulatory scrutiny in Europe and the United States over its substantial financial backing of OpenAI and concerns about market dominance. Partnering with a prominent European AI player like Mistral can be seen as a strategic move by Microsoft to demonstrate support for a broader AI ecosystem and offer alternatives to Azure customers.
Such a partnership offers clear benefits. For Mistral AI, Microsoft provides vast resources, including financial backing (however modest initially), state-of-the-art technological infrastructure via Azure, and access to a global market presence. This enables Mistral AI to scale its technology more rapidly and reach new customers.
However, these types of alliances also raise fundamental concerns about how large technology companies might influence the direction and accessibility of AI development. The path of Mistral AI, which started with a strong open-source ethos, partnering closely with a tech giant and heavily promoting its proprietary models (like Mistral Large on Azure), draws parallels with OpenAI's evolution. This raises questions about the long-term commitment to open-source principles and whether the accessibility and modifiability of cutting-edge AI technologies might become increasingly restricted, potentially limiting broader innovation.