[jsnell]

It's obviously not exclusive (it's available hosted from both Mistral themselves and Azure). I guess it could possibly be exclusive within some smaller scope, but nothing in the article suggests that. Azure is described as the "first distribution partner", not an exclusive one.

[ZeroCool2u]

Hosting by Mistral/OpenAI/Startup is often a non-starter for the larger enterprise style customers.

For example, they have a legal agreement with Azure/GCP/AWS already and if they can say it's "just another Cloud provider service" it's stupid how much easier that makes things. Plus, you get stuff like FEDRAMP Moderate just for having your request sent to Azure/GCP/AWS instead? Enormous value.

Getting any service, but especially a startup and one that ingests arbitrary information, to be FEDRAMP certified is the bureaucratic equivalent of inhaling a candy bar.

[ethbr1]

Absolutely. Self-certification imposes non-negligible and recurring (recertification) costs to a business.

And when you're industry-agnostic, you have to play whack-a-mole with whatever the chosen industry wants (e.g. HIPAA/HITRUST, FEDRAMP, etc.).

Additionally, indemnification clauses and contractual negotiation of same can be a minefield. "You assume all the risk, for any breach, even if it's our fault, with unlimited liability" is every customer's preference. Small companies have neither the cash reserves to survive an (unlikely) claim nor the clout to push back on bad terms with a big customer. Microsoft et al. do.

[vitorgrs]

Yes, just like you can get GPT on OpenAI API too. But that's it. You can't get GPT on AWS or any other cloud provider, just like it seems it won't be possible to get mistral closed models on any other cloud providers either.