Microsoft (MS) has joined hands with French artificial intelligence (AI) startup Mistral AI, the ‘European version of Open AI’. Like Open AI, it’s interpreted as a surprise move targeting the European market beyond easy investment.
CNBC reported on the twenty sixth (local time) that Microsoft signed a partnership with French AI startup Mistral AI to offer European technology support.
In response to this, Microsoft will invest 2 billion euros (roughly 2.8896 trillion won) in Mistral AI and support MS's computing infrastructure to create recent industrial opportunities and expand into the worldwide market. With this agreement, Mistral AI has turn out to be the second company to offer large language models (LLM) to Microsoft's cloud service Azure, following OpenAI.
Brad Smith, President of Microsoft, said at MWC held in Barcelona, Spain, “This contract is a very important signal of the corporate’s support for European technology. By agreeing to a long-term partnership, Mistral AI will immediately develop next-generation AI models in our infrastructure, the AI data center.” “We’ll help train and deploy,” he said.
As well as, Mistral AI released three exclusive LLM models. To start with, the 'Mistral Large' model supports English, French, Spanish, German, and Italian in a context window of 32,000 tokens, and is provided through a paid API.
The 'Mistral Small' model has lower inference capabilities, but has the advantage of lower cost and lower waiting time.
Lastly, we strengthened user accessibility by launching 'Le Chat', a multilingual conversation chatbot based on the straightforward and light-weight 'Mistral Next' model.
Meanwhile, the partnership between the 2 corporations is attracting attention because it was achieved amid pressure from the European Union (EU) antitrust regulators in relation to Microsoft's $13 billion investment in Open AI.
As well as, in keeping with the EU's 'AI Act', which is about to be finalized, the Open AI model is subject to many restrictions, corresponding to disclosing copyright sources and passing various safety tests.
In this example, it could actually be seen that an alternate has been secured by securing Mistral AI, which is under the protection of the EU, and providing chatbot services in European languages.
When asked whether this investment was an effort to resolve competition concerns, President Smith responded, “The corporate is doing its best to offer quite a lot of products.”
“This decision is very important since it shows that it will not be nearly Microsoft technology or American products,” he said. “It should even be a driving force for technology, innovation, and growth in Europe.”
Reporter Park Chan cpark@aitimes.com