Mistral AI launches Mistral Large model and partners with Microsoft for Azure distribution

Mistral AI, a European generative AI firm, has unveiled Mistral Large, its most advanced language model, and announced a partnership with Microsoft to offer their models on Azure. Mistral Large is now available via La Plateforme and Azure, marking the company's first distribution partnership.

Mistral Large is designed for complex multilingual reasoning tasks, such as text understanding, transformation, and code generation. According to Mistral, the model “achieves strong results on commonly used benchmarks, making it the world's second-ranked model generally available through an API (next to GPT-4)”.

The model boasts native fluency in English, French, Spanish, German, and Italian, demonstrating a nuanced comprehension of grammar and cultural context.

On its side, Microsoft has announced “a multi-year partnership between Microsoft and Mistral AI, a recognized leader in generative artificial intelligence”, and has stated that “This partnership with Microsoft enables Mistral AI with access to Azure’s cutting-edge AI infrastructure, to accelerate the development and deployment of their next generation large language models (LLMs) and represents an opportunity for Mistral AI to unlock new commercial opportunities, expand to global markets, and foster ongoing research collaboration.”

As of today, Mistral Large is accessible through La Plateforme, on Microsoft Azure, and for self-deployment for the most sensitive use cases.