Paris-based startup Mistral AI has cemented itself as a rising star in the artificial intelligence world, landing major partnerships with IBM, Microsoft, and others just one year after its founding.  The fledgling company is moving fast to commercialize its state-of-the-art natural language processing models and conversational AI capabilities. Mistral unveiled its flagship commercial model, Mistral Large, on Monday through a deal with Microsoft to offer it via the Azure cloud platform. This makes Mistral only the second provider after OpenAI to offer a commercial large language model on Azure. Mistral Large is designed to compete head-to-head with OpenAI’s dominant GPT-3 and GPT-4 models by generating human-like text and conversing knowledgeably on a wide range of topics. According to Mistral’s benchmarks, it is the world’s second most capable commercial language model behind GPT-4. Mistral-Large ranks second among all models generally available through an API and provides top-tier reasoning capabilities, according to the company (Credit: Mistral) Microsoft deal signals Mistral as top AI innovator Securing a deal with Microsoft to deploy Mistral Large on Azure is a …