Mistral Falls
Microsoft announces a partnership with French AI startup, Mistral
🔷 Subscribe to get breakdowns of the most important developments in AI in your inbox every morning.
Microsoft announces a partnership (read: licensing their latest models + taking a small equity stake in the firm) with Mistral. Mistral is a French AI startup founded by ex-Meta AI lab researchers.
Mistral originally focused on releasing smaller open-source models, scaling them up over the last 6 months until now, when it’s in striking distance of GPT-4.
The Mistral-Large model:
is natively fluent in English, French, Spanish, German and Italian
has 32k tokens context
has precise instruction following: don’t know how this claim is measured… as it could potentially be full AGI if it means what it’s supposed to mean (obviously not, but they chose the language)
function calling - JSON output formatting
They’re not open-sourcing it for now; it’s available via API or lease in its own environment from MSFT.
Interestingly, Mistral seems to have created multilingual versions of popular benchmarks, and this could be a significant contribution if they decide to open-source this
The model is priced at par with GPT-4.
Still haven’t beaten OpenAI, but we’re probably only a few months away at this point.
Even in AI, the money train seems to be tightening.
As some had expected it to:
This also hedges MSFT position in OpenAI from regulatory scrutiny
Satya playing another masterstroke… you gotta think: Where is Andy Jassy at Amazon in all this?