Microsoft's latest offering, Mistral Small, is perfect for low-latency workloads

In February 2024, Microsoft signed a $2.1 billion deal with Mistral AI, a France-based company, to enhance its cloud computing platform, Microsoft Azure. Leveraging the partnership, Microsoft has added another one of Mistral AI’s language models, Mistral Small, to its portfolio.

Mistral Small, available in the Azure AI model catalog, is the smallest LLM developed by Mistral AI so far.

According to Microsoft’s official blog post, the language model offers the following advantages over the other options:

1. A small model optimized for low latency: Very efficient for high volume and low latency workloads. Mistral Small is Mistral’s smallest proprietary model, it outperforms Mixtral 8x7B and has lower latency.
2. Specialized in RAG: Crucial information is not lost in the middle of long context windows. Supports up to 32K tokens.
3. Strong in coding: Code generation, review and comments with support for all mainstream coding languages.
4. Multi-lingual by design: Best-in-class performance in French, German, Spanish, and Italian – in addition to English. Dozens of other languages are supported.
5. Efficient guardrails baked in the model, with additional safety layer with safe prompt option.

You can try out Mistral Small through Models as a Service (MaaS) in Azure AI Studio today. It’s a highly efficient option that is best suited for high volume and low latency workloads. And, as was the case with previous models, deploying the language model is effortless and doesn’t take more than a few seconds!

Mistral’s documentation says the language model is suitable for simpler tasks that can be done in bulk. Examples include text generation, customer support, and classification.

The Redmond-based tech-giants AI push in recent years has delivered results, with Microsoft Azure’s growth rate towering over AWS and Google Cloud. We will have to wait and see what impact Mistral Small has on the future growth rate!

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