Microsoft backed French startup Mistral AI set to rival OpenAI

Microsoft just struck a deal with the French start-up Mistral AI to rival the $86 billion AI powerhouse that is OpenAI. In recent weeks, we saw brands such as Google, Facebook, and Apple all gearing up to include AI in their platform to make the experience more versatile.

Now Microsoft is backing a French AI startup to bring their product in the competitive AI market. The multiyear partnership is set to help the almost 10 month year old company to bring its Mistral AI available to third parties.

Microsoft president Brad Smith has said about the implementation of AI, to use these models in the public sector to meet their specific needs. Mistral set to become the second company to provide commercial language models on Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing service.

Arthur Mensh, co-founder of Mistral praised Microsoft for their support by saying –

“Microsoft’s trust in our model is a step forward in our journey to put frontier AI in everyone’s hands,”

About Mistral AI organization

Before we get into the deal, here is a little bit of information about Mistral. This Paris based company was founded by Mensh, Timothee Lacroix and Guillaume Lample. It will be a surprise to many to learn the trio behind Mistral were once Meta and Google researchers. 

Mistral is catching a lot of heat in the market, as last December they acquired a 2 billion euro valuation with funding worth of 400 million euro. It all sounds huge but it is a far cry from where OpenAI operates in the world, as last year OpenAi was estimated to be worth around $86 billion dollars.

OpenAI’s recent lineup of services have made them quite a force to be reckon with in the market. But recent comments from the co-founders of Mistral have made things clear on their future of Mistral AI in the current market. 

What makes Mistral appealing?

With OpenAI, you have GPT-4 or as it is known as Black box. The data and code used to build the GPT-4 are not open source, not available to third parties. But Mistral’s models are open source, almost all the technical jargon behind the system will be open to the public.

About the Mistral and Microsoft deal

The financial details of the deal are kept hidden, the news got announced by Mistral a few hours ago. The partnership between Microsoft and Mistral will include collaboration on research and development of applications for governments all across Europe.

Microsoft doesn’t hold any equity in the company, they just made a small investment in Mistral. The deal with Mistral is not the first for Microsoft, as the tech giant has already dipped their hand in the AI game by investing $13 billion dollars in OpenAI. That’s not all, Microsoft announced $5.6 billion in new AI data center investments in Germany and Spain.

Microsoft doesn’t own or has any control over OpenAI. Investing in AI now has become the norm for many mega companies in the world. Recently other big tech rivals of Microsoft Google and Apple also invested heavily in generative Ai functionalities to make their products valuable in the market.

Many analysts speculate the investment towards AI will shake up many industries in the world. At this point AI is a new sector; not something part of a small minority. Smith went on to say – 

“We see this as a new sector of the economy that’s emerging; we call it the AI economy and it’s going to create entirely new businesses and new business categories,” 

The recent stories of AI implementation have opened the doors to many possibilities in the industry. This year will be filled with AI expenditure on common products and revolution one we have never seen before in the world of Tech.

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