The AI field was dull and boring. But not anymore. It's becoming the hype that pretty much everyone one wants to get into.
What was kickstarted by OpenAI when it launched ChatGPT, tech companies of all sizes that started to see the benefits of this technology, and began experimenting and developing their own solutions.
The competition may have started in the U.S., with big companies like Google, Microsoft and others trying to rival in this lucrative business. But the rest of the world also took notice.
In China, for example, tech titan Alibaba created EMO.
This time, in France, a tech startup Mistral AI also wants to disrupt the industry, by going head-to-head against OpenAI's formidable GPT-4, the thing that powers ChatGPT.
But jumping into the bandwagon, into an already saturated industry won't be easy.
Among other reasons, this is why Mistral AI is receiving help from Microsoft.
This was announced by Microsoft, saying that the company has partnered with the French startup Mistral AI.
For its part, the partnership could help it lessen its reliance on ChatGPT-maker OpenAI for supplying the next wave of chatbots and other generative AI products.
While Mistral AI is less than a year old, but it's already what Microsoft described as an "innovator and trailblazer" at building more efficient and cost-effective AI systems.
For starters, the company announced a Large Language Model it calls the 'Mistral Large,' which it claims is far superior than the original GPT-3.5, and in the same league as competitors such as OpenAI’s GPT-4, Anthropic’s Claude 2 and Google’s Gemini Pro.
By partnering with Microsoft, Mistral AI is making it available on Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing platform.
However, Mistral AI has also previously said it is teaming up with other big cloud providers including Amazon and Google.
Then, Mistral AI also released a public test version of its own chatbot, called the 'Le Chat', or French for 'The Cat.'
The demand was so huge that the company's servers were flooded with requests, rendering it temporarily unavailable during the day it was first released.
Before these, Mistral AI has a number of open AI models, which are available for free with a fully permissive license.
They include its original Mistral 7B transformer model, its smaller original model fluent in English with an 8K content window, and its most capable open model, Mixtral 8x7B with a 32K context window fluent in English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, code, according to the website.
Mistral AI was founded by three French researchers, CEO Arthur Mensch, Chief Scientist Guillaume Lample and Chief Technology Officer Timothee Lacroix, who were previously researchers working for Google and Meta.
The company made a big splash in the industry by attracting big amounts of investor funding to give it a multibillion-dollar valuation just months after it was founded.
Microsoft and Mistral AI didn’t disclose the financial terms of the deal, and that Microsoft only said that it involves a small investment in the Paris-based startup.
Reports suggest that the sum is smaller than the amount Microsoft invested into OpenAI.
The company has advertised an “open-source” approach to developing AI that involves publicly releasing key components of some AI systems, which is a contrast to companies such as OpenAI that closely guard them.
At this time at least, its flagship product, the Mistral Large, is not going to be open, according to the company’s website.