Microsoft will make French startup Mistral AI's artificial intelligence models available through its Azure cloud computing platform under a new partnership, the companies said on Monday.

The multi-year deal signals Microsoft's efforts to offer a variety of AI models beyond its biggest bet in OpenAI as the tech giant seeks to attract more customers for its Azure cloud services.

As part of the announcement, Microsoft will take a minority stake in the Mistral AI, the startup confirmed to Reuters without disclosing details.

The Paris-based startup works on open source and proprietary large language models (LLM), similar to the one OpenAI pioneered with ChatGPT, that understands and generates text in a human-like fashion.

Mistral's latest model, Mistral Large, will be first available to Azure customers as part of the partnership. Azure customers will be able to use several AI models from Mistral, which will also see its technology hosted on Microsoft's cloud computing platform.

Mistral has also been working with Amazon and Google to distribute its models. The company plans to make Mistral Large available on other cloud platforms in the next few months, according to a spokesperson.

The Paris-based firm was founded by Timothée Lacroix and Guillaume Lample, who previously worked at Meta's artificial intelligence teams, and Arthur Mensch, who was a researcher at Google's DeepMind.

  - Reuters