tech:

taffy

Microsoft partners with Mistral AI to advance Large Language Model development

Microsoft has announced a multi-year partnership with French startup Mistral AI, aiming to enhance the development and deployment of large language models (LLMs). As part of the partnership, Microsoft is reportedly allocating €15 million to the French startup, equivalent to $16.3 million based on the current exchange rate.

The Seattle giant has been working closely with Mistral AI rival Open AI. Micrsoft is believed to have invested upwards of $10 billion in the company.

This collaboration will leverage Microsoft Azure’s AI infrastructure, providing Mistral AI with resources to to accelerate the development and deployment of their next generation large language models (LLMs).

Microsoft’s partnership with Mistral AI is focused on three core areas: Providing supercomputing infrastructure through Azure AI, scaling Mistral AI’s models to market via Azure AI Studio and Azure Machine Learning model catalog, and collaborating on AI research and development for specific customer needs, including workloads for the European public sector.

In November 2023, Microsoft integrated Mistral AI’s Mistral 7B model into the Azure AI model catalog, making it accessible through Azure AI Studio and Azure Machine Learning. The collaboration will also see the launch of Mistral Large, a general-purpose language model capable of handling various text-based tasks, including coding and processing documents in multiple languages.

Mistral Large will be available first on Azure AI.

Find the blog post by Micrsoft corporate vice president, Azure AI Platform for Microsoft, Eric Boyd, here.

[Image courtesy: Mistral AI]

Just in

OpenAI launches ChatGPT Gov for U.S. government agencies — CNBC

It’s called ChatGPT Gov and was built specifically for U.S. government use; writes Hayden Field. 

DeepSeek’s popular AI app is explicitly sending US data to China — Wired

Users have already reported several examples of DeepSeek censoring content that is critical of China or its policies, writes Matt Burgess and Lily Hay Newman. 

DeepSeek hit with large-scale cyberattack, says it’s limiting registrations — CNBC

DeepSeek on Monday said it would temporarily limit user registrations “due to large-scale malicious attacks” on its services; writes Hayden Field. 

Viral AI company DeepSeek releases new image model family — TC

The models, which are available for download from the AI dev platform Hugging Face, are part of a new model family that DeepSeek is calling Janus-Pro, writes Kyle Wiggers. 

Eleos raises $60M

Eleos, a behavioral health AI company, has secured 120 million in a Series C funding round.