Paris-based startup Mistral AI has made an immediate splash in the world of artificial intelligence, securing partnerships with IBM, Microsoft and others nine months after its launch. The company is offering natural language processing models, including its flagship Mistral Large, which becomes only the second LLM (after OpenAI) to land a commercial berth on Microsoft’s Azure cloud, where Meta Platforms’ Llama 2 is available in preview. Boasting “top-tier reasoning capacities” and sophisticated conversational capabilities, Mistral Large specializes in “reasoning, analysis and generation (RAG), is multilingual and supports up to 32,000 tokens.”

“Mistral Large is designed to compete head-to-head with OpenAI’s dominant GPT-3 and GPT-4 models by generating human-like text and conversing knowledgeably on a range of topics,” according to VentureBeat, which notes that Mistral’s benchmarks tout it as “the world’s second most capable commercial language model behind GPT-4.”

The deal with Microsoft connotes “a huge vote of confidence,” VentureBeat says, explaining “Microsoft has almost certainly assessed Mistral’s capabilities and determined the startup is leading the way in AI innovation and can provide significant value to Azure customers.”

Mistral Large is also available on Mistral AI’s own developer hub La Platforme, where Mistral Small and Mistral Embed can also be found. While Mistral Large will initially represent the company on Azure, “The AI developer’s other proprietary models and its earlier open-source LLMs are set to follow suit down the road,” reports SiliconANGLE.

The French AI firm has also entered into an agreement with IBM to target its enterprise users by providing an optimized iteration of its open-source Mistral-8x7B model on IBM’s Watson AI platform.

Mistral AI was co-founded in April 2023 by Arthur Mensch of Google DeepMind and Guillaume Lample and Timothée Lacroix, both previously with Meta Platforms. In its short existence, Mistral AI “has made incredible progress developing large language models that rival far more established players,” VentureBeat assesses.

While the company has built its reputation largely on a commitment to open sourcing, Mistral Large is proprietary. It will be offered on Azure as a Model-as-a-Service (MaaS) developers can customize.

In addition to English, both Mistral Large and Mistral Small can generate text in French, Spanish, German and Italian, and craft software code as well as solve math problems. Mistral Small is open source and offers “cost-efficient reasoning for low-latency workloads.”

To date, the company has amassed nearly $530 million in funding, about $16 million of it invested by Microsoft last month, per TechCrunch, which says Mistral AI was valued at about $2 billion following a $415 million Series funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz.