Microsoft's multi-year partnership with Mistral AI, including a $16 million investment, is drawing attention from EU regulators amid concerns over competition rules. (IT World Canada)
Microsoft's recent multi-year partnership with Mistral AI has been confirmed to include a substantial investment of $16 million, which will be converted into equity during the company's next funding round. The European Union has taken notice of the deal and is now looking into it.
A spokesperson for the European Commission stated, "The Commission is examining agreements between major digital market players and generative AI developers and providers." This includes the agreement between Microsoft and Mistral AI, which the Commission plans to analyze.
Brad Smith, Microsoft's president, discussed the partnership at MWC in Barcelona, emphasizing the company's commitment to principles that promote innovation and competition in AI.
The partnership was first announced by Microsoft on Monday, with the company indicating it would make a small investment in Mistral AI. However, the financial details were not disclosed. The goal of the partnership is to help the French AI startup, which is currently valued at $2 billion, accelerate the development and deployment of its foundational models.
This marks Microsoft's second major AI deal, following the $10 billion investment in OpenAI in January 2023. This investment has drawn scrutiny from regulators in the EU, U.K., and U.S. over potential competition concerns.
Despite this, the partnership with Mistral AI suggests that Microsoft is diversifying its AI investments and expanding its global AI presence.
"It's important for us to show that this isn't just about Microsoft technology or American products. This will drive technology, innovation, and growth in Europe as well," said Smith.
The two companies have also announced plans to collaborate on training purpose-specific models for select customers, including European public sector workloads.
Under the partnership, Microsoft will support Mistral AI's workloads on Azure AI and make Mistral AI's flagship models available to customers in the Azure AI Studio and Azure Machine Learning model catalog. This will provide Microsoft's customers with a wider range of open-source models to choose from.
However, Mistral AI recently announced a new flagship model, Mistral Large, which will be closed source, unlike some of its previous models. The model is designed for complex multilingual reasoning tasks, including text understanding, transformation, and code generation. Mistral claims it is the world's second-ranked model available through an API, after GPT-4, and it will be available on Azure.
Mistral has also launched a conversational chatbot, Le Chat, which is positioned to compete with OpenAI's ChatGPT.
