Microsoft has agreed on a partnership with French AI start-up Mistral to access other AI LLMs in addition to the USD 13 billion deal with OpenAI. The Mistral LLM is particularly interesting for digital signage, as it can also be operated completely locally (on device).
On the sidelines of MWC in Barcelona, Microsoft announced on Monday a multi-year partnership with Paris-based AI company Mistral to help the company bring its AI models to market. Mistral was founded just ten months ago by former Google and Meta AI experts and is currently valued at 2 billion euros.
Mistral for the public sector
Mistral is a very interesting partner for Microsoft because its LLM is a European model and as such meets the specific EU data protection needs of the public sector (governments). The partnership makes Mistral the second company alongside OpenAI to deploy commercial language models on Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing platform.
Also suitable for digital signage
Mistral has also been used in the digital signage industry for a few weeks now. Ameria is one of the first digital signage market players to use the Mistral Large Language Model (LLM) on a media player. The Heidelberg-based company has developed its own Large Action Model (LAM) based on Mistral, which, in contrast to OpenAI, also runs completely locally.
Local LLMs have the advantage of being faster than cloud-based platforms and generating less data traffic. The Generative AI side of that is particularly interesting for digital signage because texts, images, and videos can be generated in seconds.