Au contraire, I think in the eyes of beige khaki corpo bureaucrats this gives Mixtral legitimacy and puts it on par with OpenAI offerings. MS putting their Azure stamp on this means it's Safe and Secure (tm).
It makes even more sense from MS perspective -- now they can offer two competing models on their own infra, becoming the defacto shop for large corporate LLM clients.
+1 to this. At the big enterprise I work for, OpenAI directly is perceived as not legit enough. However they use OpenAI's products through Azure's infrastructure.
It makes even more sense from MS perspective -- now they can offer two competing models on their own infra, becoming the defacto shop for large corporate LLM clients.