REDMOND (dpa-AFX) - Technology giant Microsoft (MSFT) announced a multi-year agreement with Mistral AI, an artificial intelligence start-up, to broaden its horizon in the artificial intelligence industry by outpacing OpenAI.
Under the agreement, Microsoft would invest $2.1 billion in the French company to help the start-up's commercial growth and market expansion, in addition to an unspecified amount for research and development of AI models for public sector services in Europe.
In return, Mistral would provide commercial language models on Microsoft's Azure cloud computing platform.
'What we're fundamentally agreeing to a long-term partnership with Mistral AI so that they can train and deploy their next generation models for AI on our AI data centers, our infrastructure, effective immediately,' Microsoft President Brad Smith said.
The Paris-based company would also launch ChatGPT-style AI chatbot named 'Le Chat'.
'We see this as a new sector of the economy that's emerging; we call it the AI economy and it's going to create entirely new businesses and new business categories,' Smith added.
The deal comes as Microsoft is under scrutiny by regulators in the U.S., E.U. and U.K. regarding its whooping $13 billion investment in San Francisco-based OpenAI.
Earlier, Spanish telecom company Telefonica entered into an agreement with Microsoft to integrate Azure AI Studio into its digital system in order to interpret data using AI language models.
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