Microsoft President and Vice Chairman Brad Smith outlined a set of principles for responsible adoption of AI and a multi-year partnership with France-based Mistral AI in his keynote today at MWC24 Barcelona. .
The collaboration with Mistral AI is notable because Microsoft previously invested in rival OpenAI. The total value is believed to be around $13 billion.
Smith said the partnership with Mistral AI reflects Microsoft’s commitment to working with a wide range of companies as part of the AI Access Principles announced at MWC24.
Mistral AI can now train and deploy AI models across Microsoft datacenters. Its AI models will be made available to developers and anyone who wants to use them through Microsoft’s Azure cloud service through its “as a service” initiative.
“We’re focused not only on proprietary software, but also our partnership with OpenAI, which is very important, but also our partnerships with a number of companies,” Smith said. “It’s not just about training and deploying models. It’s about helping people make the models available to customers and software developers so they can use them, and helping customers buy them.”
Smith said Microsoft runs about 1,600 AI models across its data centers, 1,500 of which are open source. He said anyone who wants to create a model, or an application that runs on top of it, can access the public version of the API that Microsoft uses.
The company did not disclose financial details of its partnership with Mistral AI.
According to Smith’s blog, Microsoft’s AI principles govern how it operates its data centers and additional AI assets around the world. He explained that there are a total of 11 principles of AI, but they mainly fall into three categories.
The first is the responsibility to enable innovation and competition, and the second is to meet AI obligations under national laws and regulations. The final principle is to build broad AI-based partnerships, including co-developing technology stacks.
“They’re about access. They’re about equity, and they’re about our broader social responsibility,” he said.
He said customers are also free to bring their models and data to other companies’ data centers and clouds.
“It’s our responsibility to make it easy for them to do so.”
