Mistral AI partners with Microsoft, announces "Mistral Large" and chat app "Le Chat"
On February 26, 2024, Mistral AI announced its highest-performing closed model, “Mistral Large,” along with “Le Chat,” a conversational app for using it. The same day, Microsoft announced an investment of roughly €16.3 million in Mistral AI and a multi-year partnership making Azure its preferred cloud partner — a day that dramatically deepened the ties between the French startup and Microsoft.
Details
- Mistral Large: A general-purpose language model with strong reasoning and knowledge capabilities, also excelling at code and math. It can process multiple documents at once and supports English along with French, German, Spanish, and Italian
- Le Chat: Released in beta as a conversational app letting users switch between Mistral Large, Mistral Small, and an experimental fast variant called “Mistral Next.” It supports multiple languages and includes a moderation mechanism that lets users adjust content sensitivity
- Enterprise version: “Le Chat Enterprise,” featuring self-deployment and fine-grained moderation controls, was announced at the same time
- Microsoft partnership: Microsoft invested roughly €16.3 million in Mistral AI, and the two signed a multi-year partnership covering training and inference support on the Azure AI platform, as well as offering Mistral models through Azure AI Studio
- Limitation: At this stage, Le Chat had no internet access and could not answer questions about current events
What happened next
This partnership and announcement established Mistral AI’s position as Europe’s answer to OpenAI. Le Chat continued to gain features afterward, adding image generation in November 2024 and a mobile app plus a Pro plan in February 2025.