Microsoft has struck a deal with Mistral, the French competitor to OpenAI. Its chatbot is called Le Chat (obviously). I’ve not tried it yet, but here’s hoping it’s rude, arrogant, and pretends not to understand you if you make a tiny typo.

The lowdown

• 🪙 Bitcoin breaks $57,000 for first time since late 2021.

• 🏖️ Expedia to cut about 1,500 jobs in latest restructuring.

• ✂️ Fed’s Schmid says there’s no need to cut rates ‘preemptively’.

Featured story

Microsoft partners with Mistral in second AI deal

Last year, the AI hype well and truly revolved around OpenAI. But in France, another power was growing. Mistral is a ten-month-old AI startup founded by former DeepMind and Meta engineers. It’s already valued at more than $2 billion, and Microsoft has just taken a stake in the company ($).

Through the partnership, Mistral’s latest models will be available to customers of Microsoft Azure, the company’s cloud platform. Mistral has also unveiled a new model called Large,  that it says has “unique reasoning capacities” and is fluent in five languages.

The move allows MIcrosoft to diversify its AI partnerships beyond OpenAI. It has invested $13 billion in the company, drawing the attention of European regulators. The partnership is the subject of antitrust probes in the EU and UK, though Microsoft says the companies operate independently.

The content we're consuming today

• The Verge: A lot of Redditors hate the Reddit IPO

• Big Think: Do all humans feel music the same way?

• Insider: Gen Z is living with their parents to save money – but it's going to cost them, big time

Off-balance sheet items

• Nancy Pelosi just bought call options worth up to $1.25 million in Palo Alto Networks. Want to trade alongside her? There’s an ETF for that.

The bottom line