It feels like Microsoft is misusing the partnership only to block other companies from having access to the IP. They said they don't need the partnership, that they have got all what they need, so there would be no need to have the partnership.
If this is the way Microsoft misuses partnerships, I don't feel good about Mistral's new partnership, even if it means unlimited computing resources for them and still have the freedom to open source their models.
Not seeing Mistral Large as an open source model now has a bitter taste to it.
I also wonder if this lawsuit was the reason for him checking out Windows 11.
A company needs a product to sell. If they give away everything, they have nothing to sell. This was surely always the plan.
(1) They can give away the model but sell an API - but they can’t serve a model as cheap as Goog/Msft/Amzn who have better unit economics on their cloud and better pricing on GPUs (plus custom inference chips).
(2) they can sell the model. In which case they can’t give it away for free. Unlike open source code, there probably isn’t a market for support and similar “upsells” yet.
Which has a simple solution, release the model weights with a license which doesn't let anyone to commercially host them (like AGPL-ish) without your permission. That is what Stability.ai does it.