AI: Microsoft announces agreement with Mistral, OpenAI’s rival – 02/27/2024 – Tech

Microsoft will make artificial intelligence models from French startup Mistral AI available through its Azure cloud computing platform under a new partnership, the companies announced on Monday (26). The European Union announced on Tuesday (27) that it will investigate the agreement.

The multi-year deal signals Microsoft’s efforts to offer a variety of AI models beyond its biggest bet on OpenAI, as the tech giant seeks to attract more customers to its Azure cloud services.

As part of the deal, Microsoft will acquire a minority stake in Mistral, the startup confirmed to Reuters without disclosing details.

Microsoft confirmed its investment in Mistral, but said it does not have an equity stake in the company. Mistral works with open source and large proprietary language models (LLM), similar to the model OpenAI pioneered with ChatGPT, which understands and generates text in a human-like way.

The Paris-based startup has also been working with Amazon and Google to distribute its models. The company plans to make Mistral Large available on other cloud platforms in the coming months, according to a spokesperson.

The European Union announced it will investigate the deal as part of its ongoing scrutiny of big tech companies’ AI partnerships. The EU’s executive arm previously warned that Microsoft’s support for OpenAI could be subject to EU merger rules.

“What is emerging further shows that it was good not to weaken our ambition for the security of GPAI (general purpose AI) models with systemic risks, following legitimate but strong lobbying from companies like Mistral,” said Brando Benefei , member of the European Parliament who oversaw the drafting of the AI ​​Law. “This story (the agreement between Microsoft and Mistral) will need to be further investigated.”

Throughout discussions on the EU’s broad AI Law, Mistral lobbied for more flexible rules for some models, with warnings that strict rules risked undermining the ability of European companies to compete with big tech corporations.

Representatives from Microsoft and Mistral AI did not comment on the European Union’s announcement.

Yuvraj Malik, Krystal Hu, Martin Coulter and Foo Yun Chee