Unless you've been immersed in the world of artificial intelligence, you may not have heard of Mistral, a French startup that has built an impressive set of large-scale language models comparable to OpenAI

That is about to change as the company has signed a multi-year deal with Microsoft to bring its next-generation GPT-4 level AI model Mistral Large to the Azure cloud

Mistral is less than a year old as a company, but it is worth more than $2 billion and has produced a variety of models that are close to or comparable to major players such as OpenAI and Google, especially the new Mistral Large

As part of the new updates and partnerships, Mistral is also rolling out a ChatGPT competitor called 'Le Chat' which is a conversational entry point to access various models

Mistral is building a large language model Microsoft's Azure cloud platform includes an AI library that includes OpenAI models This agreement will add Mistral Large and older open source models to that library

Mistral Large is the first model by the French startup to be compared to Gemini Ultra and GPT-4 in general benchmarks and tests However, unlike previous Mistral models, it will not be open source

Mistral's co-founder, computer scientist Arthur Mensch, told La Monde that the company's agility has allowed it to gain an edge over larger, more established players and to do business with Microsoft and others

"Yes, we can compete with OpenAI and Google Agility is our strength," he explained in an interview

"We showed that with a small team focused on creating the best text generation models, we can develop world-class technology"

Mensch, who was part of the Gemini Project team during his time at Google before founding Mistral, said that now is the time to focus on figuring out the technology, distributing it, and getting it into developers' hands That's what our partnership with Microsoft is all about," he said"

The partnership with Microsoft Azure provides more than a place to sell access to Mistral's latest models

This is not unusual; Microsoft has invested $10 billion in OpenAI, Amazon has invested in Anthropic, and Google has invested in all of them

For now, Mistral Large is available through Microsoft's Azure cloud and on Mistral's website via API and Le Chat