Microsoft has announced a new partnership with French startup Mistral AI, marking a significant step forward in the world of artificial intelligence. Mistral AI has recently unveiled its most advanced language model, Mistral Large, along with a chat interface named “le Chat.”

Mistral’s language models are now regarded as a strong competitor to industry giants like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot. In fact, Mistral Large has been ranked second only to GPT-4 in terms of common sense and reasoning abilities.

One noteworthy aspect of Mistral’s new models, Mistral Large and Mistral Small, is that they are proprietary and not open-source like previous models. This move signifies a mainstream acceptance of Mistral within the AI community.

Microsoft’s decision to partner with Mistral can be seen as a strategic move to diversify its AI offerings and potentially hedge against competitors like OpenAI. Mistral’s models will now be available alongside OpenAI’s on selected Microsoft Azure services.

Furthermore, Mistral has also introduced new products such as le Chat and le Chat Enterprise, which are aimed at providing AI solutions to businesses. This move appears to be following in the footsteps of OpenAI in catering to the commercial sector.

The transition of both Mistral and OpenAI from open-source startups to closed partners of major cloud providers has raised concerns within the open-source AI community. It remains to be seen how this shift will impact the future of AI development and accessibility.