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Microsoft strikes deal with Mistral in push beyond OpenAI
- stall84 3y agoHey when articles are paywalled like this.. What do most of you guys/gals do ? Just comment on the headline?
- be_erik 3y agoUsing an archive link, normally works: https://archive.is/ouoE5 https://archive.is/ouoE5
- overvale 3y agohttps://archive.ph/ouoE5 https://archive.ph/ouoE5
- weberer 3y agoI automatically hit Ctrl+F and search for any comments mentioning "archive". Someone usually posts one within 5 minutes.
- euniceee3 3y agoAssume the content is trash and then read the comments for the recap. Like anything that is relevant will get quoted.
- philoinvestor 3y agoI don't see how this "AI rush" isn't going to skew markets, skew the financials of big tech and create a bubble in the space.
- gitfan86 3y agoThere is a bubble in the valuations of LLMs similar to the valuation of NFTs. Anyone can create a modified version of Llama2.
- ctrw 3y agoYes and each of those costs between half a million in pure compute to a few hundred million for fine tuning/training.
- thethimble 3y agoThe last All in Podcast had an interesting take on this: Most of the R&D and Capex going into LLMs/GenAI is speculative. The investments haven’t translated into real revenue yet. The expectation is that there will be a large pot of revenue at the end of the road, but we haven’t seen the killer apps to substantiate this. This makes for a perfect bubble if the promise doesn’t pan out. Relatedly Nvidia’s revenue - as impressive as the recent growth has been - is fully exposed to this risk. Of course it’s possible (likely?) that there will be major wins from this tech, but the fact that there isn’t definitive proof (in the form of revenue) yet represents real risk.
- andai 3y agoWell, the major win will be when AI makes human labor uneconomical. Not sure what that's going to do to the stock prices though...
- pantulis 3y ago> The expectation is that there will be a large pot of revenue at the end of the road, but we haven’t seen the killer apps to substantiate this Imho, unlike crypto and NFT, AI is not a solution in search of a problem. While there is a lot of hand waving, it is not very adventurous to predict that there will be significant productivity gains by adding AI on top of current business processes. Thus the killer apps will be... the same apps we are using today with a touch of AI magic dust.
- mnky9800n 3y agoAlso, outside of making chatbots and waifus there's a lot of hard tech problems waiting for ai type solutions.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
- tmpz22 3y agoTheres a lot of not-great software that can have bites taken out of it by LLM advancements and most of the incumbents are going to pay into it because they just can't compete in the AI field. Can LLMs become reliable enough at transforming data that it can replace or augment the current slew of ETL tools? Can it produce visualizations better then current BI tools? Can copilot compete with a junior developer? Im not sure, but at this point Im willing to say 50/50 which is worth the bet.
- esics6A 3y agoThis is a bubble and one that will burst very hard. AI is the perfect technology for this. It's opaque and most investors (who barely understand tech in general) have no clue what it really does or how it works. This is the closest we've ever had to multiple large respected tech companies selling "snake oil" a cure all. The capabilities of AI they mention as if they're available today are literally many decades and generations away. Automating information workers, creatives and engineers will take AGI that's simply impossible with our technology. When the AI bubble bursts I wouldn't be surprised if takes down major tech companies with it.
- jstummbillig 3y agoCan you be specific about what the bubble is? I am getting 100x value out of my 30 chatgpt bucks. I am doing things that I could not have done pre-gpt4, being more productive by a factor of, idk, 1.25 maybe. It's quite simply the largest/simplest productivity improvement in my life, so far. Given it's only going to get better, unless they are underpricing the service by a enormous margin (as in: defrauding shareholders margin) I have a hard time understanding what shape the bubble could possibly have.
- Judgmentality 3y agoDo any AI companies actually turn a profit? I feel like the only real winner is Nvidia because they are selling shovels to the gold diggers, while all the gold diggers are trying to outspend each other without a business model that has any consideration for unit economics.
- jstummbillig 3y agoI love a prudent take on company money – but given how investing works and how young this entire thing is and the (to me) absolutely real value, I find it hard to be very worried about that part right now. I can literally run a ballpark model on my MB Pro, right now, at marginal additional electrical cost. I will be the first to say that all of this (including GPT4) is still fairly garbage, but I don't know when there was the last time in the history of tech, where less fantasy to get from here to what will be good was required.
- PheonixPharts 3y agoI've stopped believing in rational markets a long time ago. For the people behind this funding madness: > to skew markets, skew the financials of big tech and create a bubble in the space. Are the intended consequences of this. The people behind the money in AI, just like the people behind the money in crypto, don't care if there's a reality to all of this, they just care if they can make a lot of money while the music is playing. I really thought 2022 was going to be the beginning of tech returning to reality, but naively didn't understand that this would entail a lot of people with a lot of money losing money, and that's not going to happen. As with all bubbles, the interesting thing isn't pointing out there's a bubble, we've been living in many bubbles for decades now. The interesting thing is pointing out what will make it pop. So long as globally money keeps pouring into US markets we'll see this continue. On the plus side, at least LLMs are a lot of fun to work and play with!
- rchaud 3y ago"Efficient markets" deliver normal returns. The people with the most capital to throw at things are trying to create monopolies that can generate supernormal returns. This is already a highly unstable arrangement, and it's made more dangerous by introducing impurities like artificially suppressed interest rates and SPAC IPOs.
- throwup238 3y ago> I've stopped believing in rational markets a long time ago. It makes a lot more sense if you think of markets as just a bunch of coked out hairless monkeys. Then "rational" becomes a lot more meaningful.
- DANmode 3y ago> I've stopped believing in rational markets a long time ago. Agreed. Sentiment is everything.
- philoinvestor 3y agoWith the way NVIDIA is moving and how it's seeding AI startups, you could be right about them actively trying to do this. But there is a reality beyond our ability to predict it..
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- bhouston 3y agoThis is just a smart move by Satya Nadella after the non-standard drama that occurred with OpenAI a few months back where it nearly imploded and then didn't. You want both a backup for OpenAI as well as negotiating leverage if OpenAI gets too powerful and this achieves both.
- zitterbewegung 3y agoI totally agree it’s also like the move where Microsoft is at least supporting Linux on their systems and cloud as not a backup but to just close you into their ecosystem . Honestly I could see Microsoft buying Huggingface.
- bhouston 3y agoYes, Microsoft doesn't have to pick the sole winner in AI, but rather they could just start eating the AI ecosystem bit by bit so that they win by default. It is what large players can do. May open themselves up to some scrutiny for too many acquisitions and reducing competition though, but that is a separate issue.
- lostemptations5 3y agoAnd they are used to that issue too. A long history of it.
- solardev 3y ago"Microsoft recommends OpenAI as your default overlord. Did you know it can do everything your current AI can do, sometimes better, but always more profitably for us? [Switch now] [Ask me again in 30 seconds]"
- datadrivenangel 3y agoThis is how microsoft has been doing data for at least 10 years (See databricks). Step 1: Get the industry leaders to be purchasable via Azure. Step 2: Slowly build your own clone and start stealing user share even though your offering is still worse.
- htrp 3y agoInteresting that microsoft is hedging their bets across the foundational model spectrum >Microsoft will also take a minor stake in the 10-month-old Paris-based company, although the financial details have not been disclosed.
- KuriousCat 3y agoIs there an alternative for them?
- jklinger410 3y agoArchive link: https://archive.is/ouoE5 https://archive.is/ouoE5
- ShamelessC 3y agoAnyone else having issues loading that link?
- TaurenHunter 3y agoFor some reason that doesn't work for me - it just times out. Google cache did: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://www.ft.com/content/cd6eb51a-3276-450f-87fd-97e8410db9eb https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:...
- jacooper 3y agoA far better experience than the crappy archive links
- Jackson__ 3y agoDon't get used to it being around. Google is probably killing them off soon: >@searchliaison >is the cache link in the search results gone forever? >Hey, catching up. Yes, it's been removed. I know, it's sad. I'm sad too. It's one of our oldest features. But it was meant for helping people access pages when way back, you often couldn't depend on a page loading. These days, things have greatly improved. So, it was decided to retire it. >Personally, I hope that maybe we'll add links to @internetarchive from where we had the cache link before, within About This Result. It's such an amazing resource. For the information literacy goal of About The Result, I think it would also be a nice fit -- allowing people to easily see how a page changed over time. No promises. We have to talk to them, see how it all might go -- involves people well beyond me. But I think it would be nice all around. >As a reminder, anyone with a Search Console account can use URL Inspector to see what our crawler saw looking at their own page: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9012289 https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9012289 >You're going to see cache: go away in the near future, too. But wait, I hear you ask, what about noarchive? We'll still respect that; no need to mess with it. Plus, others beyond us use it. From: https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1753156161509916873 https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1753156161509916873
- throwawaymanbot 3y ago[dead]
- neel8986 3y agoAt this point OpenAI should definitely think of some sort of partership with AWS and GCP. Otherwise they will be just one of the few models
- hef19898 3y agoHonest question from someone who never touched one of those models, is OpenAI anything else than the first and most hyped model developer?
- IanCal 3y agoIME nothing is as good out of the box as gpt4 for many tasks.
- JackFr 3y agoIs gpt4 as good in non-English uses? It's not clear to me that it would be particularly important or advantageous, but does Mistral being based in Europe and polyglot first make it interesting vs. gpt4 in some dimension?
- Al-Khwarizmi 3y agoI guess it might depend on language, but as a Spanish speaker who sometimes uses LLMs in Spanish, I'd say the gap between GPT-4 and most of the competition (Mistral included) is actually larger in Spanish than in English.
- barrell 3y agoIn my experience it’s not such a simple question. If you want to be able to speak in nuanced non-English and have it pick up on the intricacies, or have it respond in rich correct non-English, then it’s not the best model (Cohere recently released an aya model that I would recommend checking out if this is your use case). If you want to be able to give basic commands and have the model reason about the logic behind your commands, gpt 4 is still the best, even in minority languages.
- rrdharan 3y agoI think there’s an EU vs US hedge here too, Mistral is likely to be more compliant or at least more favored by EU regulators (see how Spotify’s GDPR violation is playing out https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/13/spotify-gdpr-data-access-fine/ https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/13/spotify-gdpr-data-access-f...).
- KuriousCat 3y agoI would not be surprised if there are more nation level initiatives: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-02-20/australia-loss-relying-on-us-china-technology/103484844?utm_campaign=abc_news_web&utm_content=linked-in&utm_medium=content_shared&utm_source=abc_news_web https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-02-20/australia-loss-relyin...
- izolate 3y agoNot trying to be dismissive of Mistral, but I bet that's a large driving force behind the effort. Usually I'd prefer to focus on the technical aspects, but with the undeniable geopolitical impact of technology/AI, I think it necessitates a discussion.
- whimsicalism 3y agoAmerican partnerships with EU companies are subject to a lot more regulatory scrutiny in the EU.
- blitzo 3y agoI bet sooner or later Microsoft will be in hot water again with antitrust and this time with generative ai
- krautt 3y agothat's a good problem to aspire toward.
- SeanAnderson 3y agoHow come?
- crazygringo 3y agoYou're going to have to give some specific reason why though. Why this would have anything to do with antitrust is not at all obvious to me. Especially when Google has been inventing and acquiring its own generative AI technology that it is competing with.
- dandy23 3y agoBecause MS is everywhere.
- whimsicalism 3y agoThe OAI stake/deal is already under regulatory review and generally EU is perceived as blocking most large tech mergers since the iRobot intervention. I suspect we are going to soon see political backlash against regulation in the EU as it is becoming very clear that this is causal to their bad capital markets.
- blackoil 3y agoOAI merger?
- whimsicalism 3y agosorry mis-spoke - OAI stake.
- ChrisArchitect 3y ago[dupe] Official MS post: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/ai-machine-learning-blog/mistral-large-mistral-ai-s-flagship-llm-debuts-on-azure-ai/ba-p/4066996 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/ai-machine-learning-b... Official Mistral post: https://mistral.ai/news/mistral-large/ https://mistral.ai/news/mistral-large/ More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39511477 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39511477
- moralestapia 3y agoNot a dupe, that one is about the LLM release, this one is about the MS-Mistral deal.
- ChrisArchitect 3y agoNot only does the official Mistral post have a whole section on the deal, it links out further to MS's official post on the deal also. It's all the same discussion
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- moralestapia 3y agoSmart move by Satya, to fund both sides of the war.
- neutralino1 3y agoSatya is buying popcorn.
- cuckatoo 3y agoThis is just another play to give out more Azure credits to anyone that can feasibly consume them. Azure credits show up as unearned revenue on their SEC filings where they state that they "expect to recognize approximately 45% of this revenue over the next 12 months and the remainder thereafter". It's wild that you can give out gift cards that make your company's value go up so much more than the gift cards could ever cost you. It's almost like one of those financial schemes that end badly.
- boiler_up800 3y agoJust from experience in the cloud industry, Microsoft is really successful within Europe, potentially more so than in America. I think this partnership will be really successful.
- ametrau 3y agoEmbrace < you are here
- skadamat 3y agoBrilliant move by Microsoft. You want to be the one selling shovels during a gold rush, as they say?
- whimsicalism 3y agonvidia is the shovel seller
- wing-_-nuts 3y agoquibble, but nvidia is the shovel maker. LLMs require a lot of vram but the underlying hardware requirements are actually fairly simple. There are already efforts in place to create inference specific ASICs. That'll absolutely eat into Nvidia's profit margins.
- skadamat 3y agoYeah computation has more layers and sellers, it's not a perfect analogy but good enough I feel
- Alifatisk 3y agoClever move, Microsoft have been placing ever puzzle piece correctly so far
- ranman 3y agoIs this why AWS had this announcement on Friday? https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/mistral-ai-models-coming-soon-to-amazon-bedrock/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/mistral-ai-models-coming-so...
- AISnakeOil 3y agoMistral is really fantastic compared to other local LLMs. Even the 7B model is very usable on an older GPU. Excited to see how things go from here in the open-source space.
- yogorenapan 3y agoIt’s concerning that the new model isn’t on Huggingface. I hope Microsoft doesn’t stop it from open sourcing the models and code.
- unnouinceput 3y agoGood luck with that wish bro. Microsoft is all about money and there is no money in open source for them.
- MH15 3y agoVSCode? Typescript?
- sublimefire 3y agoAnd how exactly this earns money for them? embrace extend extinguish
- yoyojojofosho 3y agoMicrosoft Azure blog post on Mistral partnership: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/microsoft-and-mistral-ai-announce-new-partnership-to-accelerate-ai-innovation-and-introduce-mistral-large-first-on-azure/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/microsoft-and-mistral...
- knowriju 3y agoI don't quite understand the other comments. The press release says Mistra Large is available first on Azure. Which means it will be available on other platforms as well ? Also, MS's relationship with OpenAI is that they have access to OpenAI's model for use in their products as well as potentially the source code. Is there anything similar with Mistral ? I can't find any such wording anywhere.
- finnjohnsen2 3y agoIt is the easiest to assume the worst for sure, but Microsoft is not the same as the Bill Gates era so Im gonna be a cautious optimist on this one. Lets hope it is to promote Azure, and they dont push the OpenAI route when it comes too openess. Which is closed and a big loss for the world and a disappointment
- tombert 3y agoThey're not the same, but they're still a for-profit company. 90's era Microsoft wasn't evil for the sake of being evil; they were evil because they felt that monopolistic practices were the easiest way to increase their share price. They have a responsibility to their shareholders to try and maximize their share price and so it's hardly unsurprising that they did the infamous Embrace Extend Extinguish, and until regulators stepped in, such practices worked pretty well. Most companies don't get large enough to form any kind of real monopoly, so it's easy to get on a high-horse. It's also easy to act like it was just a product of "those people", but I fundamentally think that it's a natural consequence of a company that has achieved nearly-total market dominance. I have very little faith that a multi-trillion-dollar company is going to prioritize what's best for the world. Fundamentally, I think that if they feel they can get away with it, they'll revert to monopolistic tendencies and try and increase share price. I'm not just picking on Microsoft here either; replace them with basically any other near-monopoly in tech and my criticisms still hold.
- finnjohnsen2 3y ago> 90's era Microsoft wasn't evil for the sake of being evil You are to forgiving. I don't care too much about the why behind the evil in the software business and this is probably why my rants fall under Godwin's law too often. I won't this time. > They have a responsibility to their shareholders to try and maximize their share price ... but I was damn close. I agree with your whole point about Microsoft. But I don't think it's the same company anymore, I like some of the recent stuff, and I trust their lack of monopoly on the web. For now.
- exe34 3y ago
- jonplackett 3y agoClever move. Thinking about it, Google or Apple should have got in there with Mistral.
- asimpleusecase 3y agohttps://mistral.ai/news/mistral-large/ https://mistral.ai/news/mistral-large/ In fulfilment of some of the comments in this thread meet mistral Large on Azure
- ingen0s 3y ago[flagged]
- k8sToGo 3y agohttps://archive.is/ouoE5 https://archive.is/ouoE5 Link has been posted multiple times
- mark_l_watson 3y agoWith mixture of experts (MoE) models, I would think that Mistral might make a lot of money reselling specific models to big players like Microsoft and Google to augment their MoE systems. I mostly use either mistral7b or mixtral8-7b for most things, and experiment with other models on the side. In what world will LLMs not become a commodity? You might answer that question by saying that on player achieves AGI and captures the market, but I think there will be more to AGI than LLMs.
- comeonbro 3y ago> With mixture of experts (MoE) models, I would think that Mistral might make a lot of money reselling specific models to big players like Microsoft and Google to augment their MoE systems I am curious about what you mean by this. There is a (very understandable) common misconception about what "mixture of experts" means in current practice. Mixtral is not a mixture of fully-separable domain experts, like one is an expert at programming and one is an expert at arts and literature. The "experts" are per-layer (and as far as I know, the subject of their "expertise" not even interpretable at this point).
- hscontinuity 3y agoI'm lost here. Can anyone explain why the speculation of risk resounding around a 'bubble' of LLM and other emerging technologies (TinyLM, VLM, ALM, etc) is rounding a bubble? Meaning, the dot-com bubble showed a misappropriation of revenue by leading technology companies alongside the capital investorship, mainly VC's and private equity. Basically, everyone spent without producing a product; which lead to the mergers still the basis for many of the largest corporations today (and subsequently the 2008 crash, which further merged companies in the aftermath). So, for me the difference is the money being spent here in this 'bubble' isn't like parking new mall shops on various websites, then spending the capital to entice buyers to purchase (either for store products or the store itself) - rather - it seems to me that both private and public sentiment is that the future is bright with the right application of these tools, in the right systems, to promote applicable use cases for things we (humans) can leave up to code/machines. For instance, one of the most impressive applications of TinyLM uses is setting up several (or dozens) of tiny sensors in say a greenhouse. Each sensor can be linked to a central data repository for active monitoring to deploy active controls - be it barometric pressure, moisture content (soil, air), etc. Linking a bunch of these devices and letting it automatically run, along with linking this sensors as the data-providers to machines that may in turn plant, cull, trim, essentially a fully automated greenhouse. I'm not greenthumb and I lack in-depth knowledge around how greenhouses (modern or old) work. However, it's without understanding the details I do understand it still takes a (or more) human to maintain the greenhouse. Consider making these kinds of greenhouses (as is standard in some places now with vertical in-door growing farms) completely autonomous. That's pretty technologically feasible it would seem with the newest applications of (quote) AI. And it's likely very profitable as well. If I were to take the same ideology and apply to other industries, I find several applications like the one I mention that would absolutely change how we (humans) live in this (soon to be, IMHO) post-human industrialized world. So where is all of the doom and gloom from - monopoly, errant comprehension of the technologies, or simply dogma?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- nojvek 3y agoMicrosoft knows they won big in Cloud via Azure Big as in 100s of billions. They know someone is going to win big in AI. They lost big on the mobile OS. It is the biggest blunder of Microsoft. They don’t want to lose on AI. Better to hedge your bets. They have so much money lying around. Better to invest where they think the puck will be. Yes AI is hyped but I doubt the bubble will burst. Cheap human like intelligence if achieved via AGI is gonna make them 10x more valuable. Meta is all in, Google is all in, Microsoft is all in. Tesla is betting they’ll be the biggest robotics company on the planet. Getting to AGI is like getting to first nuke for tech behemoths.
- MuffinFlavored 3y ago> They lost big on the mobile OS. It is the biggest blunder of Microsoft. I've watched Bill Gates tell Andrew Ross Sorkin during an interview "if it wasn't for the FTC investigating us for the anti-trust lawsuit, we wouldn't have been distracted/took our eye off the prize on mobile" How sure are we Microsoft "has what it takes/had what it took" to deliver a phone + operating system as polished as Apple? Windows 11 is very much measurably worse than Mac OS Sonoma. Littered with ads, in between old UI + new UI patterns, etc. That's 2024 I'm not super confident I'd prefer a Microsoft/Windows mobile OS and therefore I'm not super confident they could actually have delivered a good one
- fragmede 3y agoIt doesn't matter if it's any good, it just has to be functional, which Microsoft proved they can do, since windows phones existed. Microsoft has the business side (aka money and patience that Google doesn't) to make it happen. Look at how well Microsoft Teams is doing. Look at Bing, now that it's got ChatGPT behind it.
- quantisan 3y agoI had multiple Microsoft Lumia as my primary driver for a couple years. I've been on iPhones for 10+ years total. There were some good (better user interface) and bad (Live logins required in random places) with Windows Mobile. Like Windows, they have pockets of good ideas fractured by their lack of cohesion.
- shp0ngle 3y ago[flagged]
- utdoctor 3y ago[flagged]
- azinman2 3y agoWhat I don’t get is that mistral is really only possible because of Meta.. and Meta has a user limit on the license. Does that not apply to Microsoft hosting this? Isn’t the economics quite weird here? I’d be pissed if I were meta that someone took my model that I spent millions on and now will host a fine tuned version for money facilitated by Microsoft.
- anonym29 3y agoRelated: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39517016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39517016
- reissbaker 3y agoHuh, I wonder if this comes with an OpenAI-like exclusivity deal for Mistral's closed models. If so, Satya just wrapped up pretty much the two largest names in AI other than Google. Sad but expected that Mistral is releasing its newer models as closed source. There was never a clear revenue stream from the open models. I'm confused why they aren't allowing their models to be finetuned, though — that seems like an obvious way to compete with OpenAI, which only allows finetuning of its pretty weak gpt-3.5-turbo. Sure, Mistral can't quite beat GPT-4 yet, even if it's close — but allowing finetuning would likely result in way better than GPT-4 performance on a broad variety of tasks (as long as you picked a few to specialize in).
- option 3y agoIt's not close. Long tail is probably as hard for LLMs as it is for search.
- IAmNotACellist 3y ago>other than Google Which has proven worse than useless. It's a brand-damaging laughing stock.
- marginalia_nu 3y agoGoogle's always been kinda garbage at marketing. Their challenges don't seem to be technical, as much as organizational.
- nine_zeros 3y agoIt is organizational. The amount of time people spend on performance reviews and other organizational dances can easily be harvested for more productive activities. But no. Thousands of employees gotta do the dance for blind committees.
- knowriju 3y agoWow, somebody has a deep wound that still hurts.
- leumon 3y agoFunny that they say "Its models are “open source”, meaning technical details will be released publicly.". In fact, they aren't only releasing the technical details, they are also releasing the model weights themselves.