Microsoft teams up with Mistral, the French competitor of OpenAI

Microsoft collaborates with French firm Mistral to expand its AI portfolio by providing users with advanced language models through Azure, expanding beyond its main OpenAI investment.

On Monday, Microsoft announced a new collaboration that will allow it to provide users of its Azure cloud computing platform with access to the artificial intelligence models created by the French firm Mistral AI.

With this multi-year arrangement, Microsoft is demonstrating its effort to offer a wider variety of AI models than just its initial investment in OpenAI. This is in line with the tech giant's goal of expanding its Azure cloud service base. Microsoft will purchase a minority interest in Mistral as part of the transaction, the firm revealed to the media without providing any other information.

Microsoft confirmed that it has invested in Mistral, but it made it clear that it has no ownership position in the business. Because of its significant financial support of OpenAI, the tech giant is under regulatory scrutiny in both Europe and the United States.

The Paris-based firm is focused on creating large language models (LLMs) that can understand and produce text in a way that is similar to human language. These models can be either proprietary or open-source, similar to OpenAI's groundbreaking work with ChatGPT.

Azure users would get first access to Mistral Large, the company's most recent proprietary model, as part of the alliance. The cloud computing infrastructure of Microsoft will host the technologies developed by Mistral.