Microsoft has recently entered into a multi-year partnership with the France-based startup Mistral AI, aimed at enhancing the AI capabilities available on its Azure platform. This collaboration marks a potentially important step for Microsoft as it seeks to expand its AI offerings, allowing Azure AI customers to access large language models developed by Mistral AI. The partnership commenced with the integration of Mistral’s Large Language Model (LLM) into Azure AI services, and now, the Mistral Small LLM has been made accessible to customers as well.
Expanding Azure’s AI Capabilities
Under this partnership, Azure AI users can now leverage the Mistral Small LLM, a feature revealed in a recent Microsoft blog post. The post outlines the capabilities of the Mistral Small LLM, highlighting its potential to perform a variety of AI tasks. Access to this new LLM is provided through an Azure subscription, with customers able to test the model via Azure AI Studio services. This move is part of Microsoft’s broader strategy to offer more diverse and powerful AI solutions to its customers, catering to a wide range of needs and applications. Mistral Small comes with the following abilities:
- “A small model optimized for low latency: Very efficient for high volume and low latency workloads. Mistral Small is Mistral’s smallest proprietary model, it outperforms Mixtral 8x7B and has lower latency.
- Specialized in RAG: Crucial information is not lost in the middle of long context windows. Supports up to 32K tokens.
- Strong in coding: Code generation, review and comments with support for all mainstream coding languages.
- Multi-lingual by design: Best-in-class performance in French, German, Spanish, and Italian – in addition to English. Dozens of other languages are supported.
- Efficient guardrails baked in the model, with additional safety layer with safe prompt option.”
Background and Future Prospects
Mistral AI was established in 2023 by ex-employees of Meta and Google’s DeepMind division, securing $415 million in funding last year. Microsoft’s partnership with the startup not only includes access to its innovative language models but also a financial investment, the details of which remain undisclosed. This collaboration follows Microsoft’s history of investing in AI startups, notably its investment in OpenAI in 2019, driven by concerns over Google’s advancements in AI.
Last Updated on November 7, 2024 8:41 pm CET
