Despite its partnership with Microsoft, Mistral promises to keep its AI open-source

However, people are not convinced.

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Mistral AI open source

Microsoft recently forged a $2.1B partnership with Mistral, the startup responsible for the development and release of the Mistral AI.

While the partnership doesn’t mean Microsoft will forget about OpenAI, it will mostly be focused on integrating and emphasizing AI adoption in Europe.

And, according to a new report by Le Monde, the startup is keen on maintaining the open source characteristic of Mistral AI, despite having a partnership with Microsoft now.

The goal is not to abandon open source. This technology is revolutionary and we have to be transparent – we must enable people to look under the hood and it’s open source that allows this.

Mistral AI

Mistral AI, which is comparable to GPT-4 in performance, is now available to use in the Azure AI platform, and earlier this month when the partnership was announced, Mistral’s co-founder Arthur Mensch said that the startup will not abandon its open-source ways.

Commercial activity will enable us to finance the costly research required for model development. We will continue to have two product ranges.

Mistral AI

However, on discussing the news, on Reddit, users are somewhat not convinced:

Some call for Mistral to release research papers and model weights.

Well… Then release the weights please. They can even release them as non-commercial wrights so people looking to make money still need to use their services, but the home gamers can use the models.

Reddit user

While others think the company is not fully transparent:

Actions speak louder than words. And for the last couple of months words is all we’ve had in terms of Mistral’s open source ambitions, and for most of that time even their words haven’t really suggested they had much interest in releasing anything open in the future.

I honestly think it’s silly to say they are dedicated to transparency while simultaneously refusing to even state the size of their closed models. That seems like it would be the absolute least they could do to showcase transparency.

Ideally they would release full on research papers and weights on top of that but I don’t have much hope of that happening based on their actions the last couple of months.

Reddit user

What do you think about Mistral’s intentions?

More about the topics: AI, microsoft