Qualcomm has just announced the start of a close collaboration with Mistral, the French unicorn which is part of the European elite in artificial intelligence. The founder plans to deploy the latest models from its new partner on a host of devices equipped with its chips, from PCs to smartphones to smart cars.
At the heart of this Franco-American alliance, we find Ministral 3B and Ministral 8B, two new models officially presented a little over a week ago. As these names suggest, it is about light and compact models, but sufficiently efficient to bring new AI features to a bunch of devices — all locally and without depending on a connection to a powerful server.
« Our most innovative customers and partners are increasingly demanding local, privacy-friendly inference for mission-critical applications such as translation, internet-free intelligent assistants, local analytics, and autonomous robotics. Ministrals have been designed to provide a computationally efficient, low latency solution for these scenarios », explained the company in a communiqué dated October 16.
Local AI for phones, PCs and cars
This pitch seems to have won over Qualcomm, a major hardware player that has dominated a large part of the mobile ecosystem for years. If you use an Android smartphone, there is a good chance that it is equipped with a SoC Snapdragon stamped Qualcomm. Ultimately, all of these devices will be able to benefit from Mistral’s mini AI models to power features such as real-time translation.
But the scope of this rapprochement goes far beyond telephones. As a reminder, Qualcomm made a big splash with the release of the Snapdragon X, new ARM chips intended for laptops.
It thus gave a big boost to the paradigm shift initiated by Apple. A trend that directly threatens the x86 architecture, omnipresent on consumer computers for many years – so much so that Intel and AMD deemed it necessary to create a large consortium to defend their business model.
The arrival of Mistral’s mini-models on these Snapdragon X is not insignificant, because they fit perfectly into the philosophy of these chips: offer significant computing power on very energy-efficient processors. It will be interesting to see how this plays out in practice. As a reminder, these chips are mainly intended for devices running Windows, Microsoft’s operating system… which maintains special relationships with OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT and world leader in commercial generative AI with which Mistral aims to compete.
Finally, Ministral 3B and 8B will also arrive on the brand new Snapdragon Cockpit Elite et Snapdragon Ride Elite. These new series of chips, revealed just three days agoare not designed for portable devices. Instead, they are intended to offering AI functionalities to a new generation of intelligent vehiclesfrom autonomous driving to on-board assistants. We imagine that the latter will be able to directly benefit from Mistral models.
A new rapprochement with American Big Tech
More broadly, this new partnership with an American tech giant illustrates the excellent dynamics of Mistral, which is carving out an increasingly solid reputation in the field of generative AI. As a reminder, the French unicorn had already joined forces with another titan, namely Microsoft, at the start of the year.
At the time, this rapprochement provoked strong reactions from European institutions, very attached to the notion of technological sovereignty. In this context, it will be interesting to see how this new partnership will be received in Brussels.
Source: www.journaldugeek.com
