Is Mistral going closed source?

Day 58 / 366

I wrote about the open-source LLM’s by Mistral AI a while back. Mistral AI is a young start-up and they have been developing some great foundational models. While their models might not be as good as GPT-4, they are cheaper, and more importantly, they are open source. They had also announced that within this year they will come out with an open-source model that is as good as GPT-4

Just a few days back, Microsoft announced that they were going to buy a stake in Mistral-AI. This would be Microsoft’s second AI investment after OpenAI. This would mean that Mistral’s models will now be hosted using Azure AI.

People are skeptical about this. This seems more like Microsoft trying to kill its competition and create a monopoly over the AI space. The latest model by Mistral AI — Mystral Large, which was supposed to compete with GPT-4 will also not be open source. And I think it won’t be long before the other open-source models are removed as well.

OpenAI, as the name suggests, was founded with the vision of keeping machine learning and AI open, and not just in the hands of a few giants like Apple and Google. This was the main reason why Elon Musk and several other people invested in OpenAI to begin with. Unfortunately, things are becoming more and more commercial now, and it seems that, unlike the internet, AI won’t be as open as we would have wanted.