Microsoft announced an artificial intelligence partnership Monday with the French startup Mistral AI that could lessen the software giant’s reliance on ChatGPT-maker OpenAI for supplying the next wave of chatbots and other generative AI products.
Mistral AI emerged less than a year ago but is already what Microsoft described Monday as an “innovator and trailblazer” at the vanguard of building more efficient and cost-effective AI systems.
Microsoft and Mistral didn’t disclose the financial terms of the deal, though Microsoft said it involves a small investment in the Paris-based startup. That suggests it is far smaller than Microsoft’s investment of billions of dollars into OpenAI, a yearslong relationship that has attracted the scrutiny of antitrust regulators in the U.S. and Europe.
Mistral on Monday released a public test version of its own chatbot, called Le Chat, that apparently was flooded with so much interest that a company executive said it was temporarily unavailable for part of the day.
The company also announced its newest large language model, Mistral Large, which it claims is in the same league as competitors such as OpenAI’s GPT-4, Anthropic’s Claude 2, and Google’s Gemini Pro and will be available on Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing platform. Mistral has also previously said it is teaming up with other big cloud providers including Amazon and Google.
Mistral made a big splash by attracting big amounts of investor funding to give it a multibillion-dollar valuation just months after it was founded last spring. Its “open-source” approach to developing AI means it publicly releases key components of its models, in contrast to companies such as OpenAI that closely guard them.
It was started by three French former researchers from Google and Meta: CEO Arthur Mensch, chief scientist Guillaume Lample, and CTO Timothee Lacroix.
When the European Union last fall was drafting the final version of its Artificial Intelligence Act, a comprehensive set of AI regulations, Mistral pushed back against efforts to impose restrictions on foundation models that power generative-AI systems. Mensch took to social media to say the EU’s proposals for a two-tier system would discourage innovative newcomers.
Login to add comment
Other posts in this group

Google released its new Gemini 2.5 Pro Experimental AI model late last month,

TikTok is shutting down TikTok Notes—wait, you didn’t even know it existed? Well, that explains a lot.
TikTok Notes, the platform’s short-lived attempt to take on Instagram (just as Inst

Influencing has a major pay gap, and it’s not what you might expect.
A new report from Collabstr, based on over 15,0


Tech leaders often brand themselves as “disruptors”—and few fit that label more snugly than Elon Musk. In the three months since joining Donald Trump in the White House following Trump’s election,

As the weekend deadline for TikTok to find a buyer approaches, bidders for the short-video so

At Visa’s ETA Transact event on April 3, the payments giant introduced three new products designed to simplify and secure payment acceptance. These innovations—Authorize.net 2.0, Unified Checkout,