Mistral Falls

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Microsoft announces a partnership (read: licensing their latest models + taking a small equity stake in the firm) with Mistral. Mistral is a French AI startup founded by ex-Meta AI lab researchers.

Mistral originally focused on releasing smaller open-source models, scaling them up over the last 6 months until now, when it’s in striking distance of GPT-4.

The Mistral-Large model:

• is natively fluent in English, French, Spanish, German and Italian

• has 32k tokens context

• has precise instruction following: don’t know how this claim is measured… as it could potentially be full AGI if it means what it’s supposed to mean (obviously not, but they chose the language)

• function calling - JSON output formatting

They’re not open-sourcing it for now; it’s available via API or lease in its own environment from MSFT.

Interestingly, Mistral seems to have created multilingual versions of popular benchmarks, and this could be a significant contribution if they decide to open-source this

The model is priced at par with GPT-4.

Still haven’t beaten OpenAI, but we’re probably only a few months away at this point.

Even in AI, the money train seems to be tightening.

As some had expected it to:

This also hedges MSFT position in OpenAI from regulatory scrutiny

Satya playing another masterstroke… you gotta think: Where is Andy Jassy at Amazon in all this?

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