Mistral AI and Microsoft forge a groundbreaking partnership in generative AI 2024

Mistral AI and Microsoft a leader in generative artificial intelligence, a global tech giant, have announced a multi-year partnership to leverage Azure AI infrastructure and offer premium models to customers. The partnership aims to accelerate the development and deployment of Mistral AI’s next-generation large language models (LLMs) and foster research collaboration.

Why Mistral AI and Microsoft?

Mistral AI and Microsoft innovators and trailblazers in the AI industry, which is undergoing a significant transformation with growing interest in more efficient and cost-effective models. Mistral AI is committed to fostering the open-source community and achieving exceptional performance with its generative AI models, which can handle any text-based use case with state-of-the-art reasoning and knowledge capabilities.

Microsoft is a pioneer and leader in developing trustworthy, scalable, and responsible AI solutions, offering world-class data center AI infrastructure and empowering individuals with the skills they need to leverage AI effectively. Microsoft is also committed to supporting global AI innovation and growth, enhancing its AI offerings, and delivering unparalleled value to its customers.

Both companies share a steadfast dedication to innovation and practical applications, bridging the gap between pioneering research and real-world solutions. The partnership between Mistral AI and Microsoft is a natural fit, as both companies have a common vision of advancing the field of AI and creating novel AI-driven innovations.

What are the benefits of the partnership?

The partnership between Mistral AI and Microsoft is focused on three core areas:

• Supercomputing infrastructure: Microsoft will support Mistral AI with Azure AI supercomputing infrastructure, delivering best-in-class performance and scale for AI training and inference workloads for Mistral AI’s flagship models.
• Scale to market: Microsoft and Mistral AI will make Mistral AI’s premium models available to customers through the Models as a Service (MaaS) in the Azure AI Studio and Azure Machine Learning model catalog.
• The model catalog offers a diverse selection of both open-source and commercial models, including OpenAI models. Customers can use Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment (MACC) to purchase Mistral AI’s models, which are also available on the Mistral AI platform.
• Azure’s AI-optimized infrastructure and enterprise-grade capabilities offer Mistral AI additional opportunities to promote, sell, and distribute their models to Microsoft customers worldwide.
• AI research and development: Microsoft and Mistral AI will explore collaboration around training purpose-specific models for select customers, including European public sector workloads.

What are the premium models offered by Mistral AI?

In November 2023, at Microsoft Ignite, Microsoft unveiled the integration of Mistral 7B into the Azure AI model catalog, accessible through Azure AI Studio and Azure Machine Learning. Mistral 7B is a general-purpose language model that can handle text-based tasks such as natural language understanding, natural language generation, summarization, translation, and more.

We are excited to announce Mistral AI’s flagship commercial model, Mistral Large, available first on Azure AI and the Mistral AI platform, marking a noteworthy expansion of our offerings. Mistral Large is a more powerful and versatile version of Mistral 7B, with enhanced 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).

This latest addition of Mistral AI’s premium models into MaaS within Azure AI Studio and Azure Machine Learning provides Microsoft customers with a diverse selection of the best state-of-the-art and open-source models for crafting and deploying custom AI applications.

How does the partnership ensure trust and safety?

The partnership between Mistral AI and Microsoft is founded on a shared commitment to build trustworthy and safe AI systems and products. Both companies adhere to the highest standards of ethical and responsible AI, ensuring that their models are fair, reliable, transparent, and secure.

Additionally, the integration into AI Studio ensures that customers can utilize Azure AI Content Safety and responsible AI tools, further enhancing the security and reliability of AI solutions.

The partnership between Mistral AI and Microsoft is a landmark in the AI industry, bringing together two leaders in generative AI and cloud computing. The partnership will enable both companies to accelerate their innovation and deliver cutting-edge AI solutions to customers across the globe.