In a multi-year partnership deal expected to get close scrutiny from EU regulators, Microsoft plans to invest in Mistral for a 'research and development collaboration to build applications for governments across Europe and “use these AI models to address public sector-specific needs”, according to Microsoft President Brad Smith.
Mistral, founded by ex Meta / Google employees, builds open source large language models, and its flagship LLM, Mistral Large, is already on Azure AI:
‘We are excited to announce the addition of Mistral AI’s new flagship model, Mistral Large to the Mistral AI collection of models in the Azure AI model catalog today. The Mistral Large model will be available through Models-as-a-Service (MaaS) that offers API-based access and token based billing for LLMs, making it easier to build Generative AI apps.’
'‘Mistral Large is a general-purpose language model that can deliver on any text-based use case thanks to state-of-the-art reasoning and knowledge capabilities. It is proficient in code and mathematics, able to process dozens of documents in a single call, and handles French, German, Spanish, and Italian (in addition to English).’