Microsoft Partners With Mistral, OpenAI's French Rival

On Monday, Microsoft (MSFT.O) announced a new partnership through which it will offer access to the artificial intelligence models developed by French startup Mistral AI via its Azure cloud computing platform.

The multi-year agreement indicates Microsoft's endeavor to provide a diverse range of AI models beyond its primary investment in OpenAI, reflecting the tech giant's aim to appeal to a broader customer base for its Azure cloud services.

As part of the agreement, Microsoft will acquire a minority stake in Mistral, as disclosed by the startup to Reuters without specifying further details.

Microsoft acknowledged its investment in Mistral but clarified that it does not possess any ownership stake in the company. The tech giant faces regulatory scrutiny in Europe and the U.S. due to its substantial funding involvement with OpenAI.

The startup based in Paris focuses on developing both open-source and proprietary large language models (LLMs), akin to the pioneering work of OpenAI with ChatGPT, capable of comprehending and generating text in a manner reminiscent of human language.

Under the partnership, Azure customers will have initial access to Mistral's latest proprietary model, Mistral Large. The technology developed by Mistral will be hosted on Microsoft's cloud computing platform.

Timothée Lacroix and Guillaume Lample, who had experience in Meta's artificial intelligence teams, joined forces with Arthur Mensch, a former researcher at Google's DeepMind, to establish Mistral.