Mistral’s ‘Le Big Model’ Beats Google’s Gemini Pro, Signs Multi-Year Deal with Microsoft

Mistral AI today released Mistral Large, its latest and most advanced language model. It is accessible through La Plateforme and Microsoft Azure, marking a strategic distribution partnership with Microsoft.

Mistral Large achieves strong results on commonly used benchmarks, making it the world's second-ranked model generally available through an API (next to GPT-4) beating Google’s Gemini Pro and Anthropic’s Claude. 

The model demonstrates advanced multilingual capabilities, fluently understanding English, French, Spanish, German, and Italian. Its 32K tokens context window allows precise information recall from extensive documents, enhancing its usability for complex multilingual reasoning tasks, including text understanding, transformation, and code generation.

Mistral Large has native multi-lingual capacities. It strongly outperforms LLaMA 2 70B on HellaSwag, Arc Challenge and MMLU benchmarks in French, German, Spanish and Italian.

Alongside Mistral Large, Mistral AI has also introduced Mistral Small, an optimised model designed for low latency workloads. Outperforming Mixtral 8x7B and featuring lower latency, Mistral Small offers a refined solution between Mistral's open-weight offering and its flagship model.

Mistral AI has streamlined its endpoint offerings, providing open-weight endpoints with competitive pricing and introducing new optimized model endpoints - mistral-small-2402 and mistral-large-2402. The company aims to offer users a comprehensive view of performance/cost tradeoffs.

Introducing JSON format mode, Mistral AI allows developers to obtain model output in a structured and valid JSON format. Additionally, the model supports function calling, enabling more intricate interactions with internal code, APIs, or databases. Currently, function calling and JSON format are only available on mistral-small and mistral-large. 

Multi-Year Partnership with Microsoft

Microsoft announced a multi-year partnership with Mistral AI. Microsoft's partnership with Mistral focuses on three core areas- Supercomputing infrastructure, Scale to Market and AI research and development. 

“We're announcing a multi-year partnership with MistralAI, as we build on our commitment to offer customers the best choice of open and foundation models on Azure,” wrote Microsoft chief Satya Nadella. 

Microsoft will provide Mistral AI with access to Azure AI supercomputing infrastructure, ensuring superior performance and scalability for AI training and inference workloads.

The collaboration aims to make Mistral AI’s premium models accessible to customers through Models as a Service (MaaS) in the Azure AI Studio and Azure Machine Learning model catalog. Customers can use Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment (MACC) for purchasing Mistral AI’s models, enhancing global availability.

Further, Microsoft and Mistral AI will explore collaboration in training purpose-specific models for select customers, focusing on European public sector workloads.