Microsoft Foundry Adds Mistral Large 3 to Azure AI Arsenal

Welcome to the Cloud Wars Agent and Copilot Minute — your daily cloud news and commentary show. Each episode provides insights and perspectives around the “reimagination machine” that is the cloud.

In today’s Cloud Wars Agent & Copilot Minute, I explore Microsoft’s addition of Mistral Large 3 to its Foundry platform and why it’s a major win for developers seeking open, enterprise-ready AI models.

Highlights

00:11 —Microsoft Foundry is a platform from Microsoft, designed for building, customizing, and deploying GenAI applications and agents. It allows users to access over 11,000 models. Recently, Microsoft added a new model to its offerings, Mistral Large 3. Microsoft claims it to be one of the strongest open-weight, Apache-licensed frontier models available on the Microsoft cloud.

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00:53 — An open-weight model is similar to an open-source model, but with some differences. In an open-weight AI model, the parameters used to train the model are publicly available, not just for use or viewing, but also for downloading and modifying. More developers are turning to these models because they offer flexibility.

01:40 — Mistral Large 3 is one of the world’s leading open models optimized for enterprise applications. It excels in instruction following, long-context comprehension and retention, multimodal reasoning, predictable performance, and applied reasoning. Unlike its closest competitors, Mistral Large 3 is fully open, with Apache 2.0 licensing.

02:08 — Each new model is carefully selected. It’s not just a free-for-all. With Foundry, Microsoft is demonstrating its expertise in the space by keenly understanding what developers want—in this case, an open model with real-world enterprise applications. The pace of AI development is such that even incremental changes and improvements dramatically impact how businesses operate.