Critics furious about Microsoft-Mistral AI partnership

Flies in the face of the AI Act

Regulators are investigating a partnership between Microsoft and French firm Mistral, which has been called "Europe’s best hope" for AI development.

Microsoft, which already owns a stake in OpenAI, this week announced a minority partnership with France's Mistral, a European competitor with the ChatGPT developer.

Mistral announced the release of two language models, Mistral Large and Mistral Small, at the same time as the Microsoft announcement, which it says is intended to bring both its open and commercial models to Azure.

For its part, Microsoft will provide both hardware and cloud infrastructure to train and run Mistral's future systems.

However, the move has attracted criticism, and now regulators from the European Commission are investigating the potential for the move to stifle competition - at the same time as they are investigating Microsoft's partnership with OpenAI.

"Furious"

Some European politicians have been outspoken in their criticism of the Microsoft-Mistral deal, saying it flies in the face of the recently agreed AI Act.

The Act, hailed as "a launch pad for EU start-ups," is intended to protect European consumers and firms - the former from unsafe AI systems, and the latter from needing funding from outside the EU.

Ironically, the French government was one of the fiercest critics of the Act in its original form. It argued that the regulation stifled innovation and would force European firms to look for foreign investment.

Kai Zenner, head of office and digital policy adviser for Axel Voss, an MEP from the centre-right European People's Party (EPP), told Euronews Next, "we are extremely furious, because the French government for months was making this argument of European leadership, meaning that those companies should be able to scale up without help from Chinese or US companies."

Zenner said Mistral was lobbying the French government during negotiations on the AI Act's wording, claiming it would be forced to work with companies like Microsoft if it did not get its way.

"Now they got all their wishes, and they do it anyway and I find this is just ridiculous," he said.

The French government says it only found out about the Mistral-Microsoft partnership on Monday. However, if it turns out that the companies were in talks while the AI Act was being drafted, Mistral could also come under investigation.

Google criticises "walled garden"

In a second bit of stunning irony, Google Cloud VP Amit Zavery has called Microsoft out for creating a cloud monopoly.

Zavery, who works for a firm that owns 80% of global search, said this week, "They are creating this whole walled garden, which is completely controlled and owned by Microsoft, and customers who want to do any of this stuff, you have to go to Microsoft only."

Microsoft is the UK's most popular cloud provider, although globally it is behind AWS. Google comes a distant third domestically, and fourth (behind Alibaba Cloud) in the global market.