Microsoft has announced a multi-year partnership with French startup Mistral AI, aiming to enhance the development and deployment of large language models (LLMs). As part of the partnership, Microsoft is reportedly allocating €15 million to the French startup, equivalent to $16.3 million based on the current exchange rate.

The Seattle giant has been working closely with Mistral AI rival Open AI. Micrsoft is believed to have invested upwards of $10 billion in the company.

This collaboration will leverage Microsoft Azure’s AI infrastructure, providing Mistral AI with resources to to accelerate the development and deployment of their next generation large language models (LLMs).

Microsoft’s partnership with Mistral AI is focused on three core areas: Providing supercomputing infrastructure through Azure AI, scaling Mistral AI’s models to market via Azure AI Studio and Azure Machine Learning model catalog, and collaborating on AI research and development for specific customer needs, including workloads for the European public sector.

In November 2023, Microsoft integrated Mistral AI’s Mistral 7B model into the Azure AI model catalog, making it accessible through Azure AI Studio and Azure Machine Learning. The collaboration will also see the launch of Mistral Large, a general-purpose language model capable of handling various text-based tasks, including coding and processing documents in multiple languages.

Mistral Large will be available first on Azure AI.

Find the blog post by Micrsoft corporate vice president, Azure AI Platform for Microsoft, Eric Boyd, here.

[Image courtesy: Mistral AI]