Mistral, a pioneering AI startup, has partnered with technology behemoth Microsoft. This collaboration has led to the launch of Mistral Large, a state-of-the-art AI model designed to cater to the complex needs of modern businesses, alongside a strategic investment of $16 million from Microsoft to fuel further innovation.
Founded merely a year ago, Mistral has rapidly ascended to prominence, not just for its distinctive Word Art logo but also for securing the largest-ever seed round in European history. With the unveiling of Mistral Large, the company sets a new benchmark in the AI landscape, offering an advanced model through its API and Microsoft’s Azure AI platform.
Unpacking Mistral Large
Mistral Large is an advanced text generation model that excels in handling complex multilingual reasoning tasks such as text understanding, transformation, and code generation. The model demonstrates proficiency in various languages including English, French, Spanish, German, and Italian, and has a nuanced grasp of grammar and cultural contexts. This makes it a superior choice for global enterprises.
One of the model’s standout features is its expansive context window of 32K tokens, which enables it to process large documents and recall information with remarkable accuracy. Additionally, Mistral Large offers precise instruction-following and native function calling, which allows developers to customize moderation policies to their specific needs.
While real-world performance remains to be seen, initial benchmarks indicate that Mistral Large is competitive, with an accuracy of 81.2% in the MMLU tests, closely following GPT-4‘s 86.4%. This performance positions it as a strong competitor to other models such as Llama 2 70B and Gemini Pro 1.0.
However, the model faces some challenges in coding tasks, as evidenced by its performance in the HumanE benchmark. Despite these hurdles, the overall capabilities of Mistral Large promise to enhance a wide array of enterprise applications.
In addition to launching Mistral Large, the company has also introduced an optimized version of its smaller model, Mistral Small — which outperforms Mixtral 8x7B — as well as a chat app that showcases the potential of its AI models in real-world applications. Although the chat app will not have internet access and may deliver outdated information, it serves as a demonstration of what teams can achieve using Mistral’s technology.
Partnership with Microsoft
Mistral’s partnership with Microsoft is a significant achievement for the startup. It not only provides financial support but also grants access to a vast distribution network through Azure AI Studio and Azure Machine Learning. This collaboration makes Mistral’s commercial language models among the select few available on Azure, which creates new opportunities for enterprise AI solutions.
