Microsoft has inked a “multi-year partnership” with the buzzy French company Mistral in what appears to be its first such dalliance with a foundation model startup not named OpenAI.

The deal will bring the startup’s large language models (LLMs) to Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform, including an exclusive release this week of a new flagship system, Mistral Large, Microsoft said in a blog post. Mistral Large is designed to compete with megamodels like GPT-4.

• Microsoft is also reportedly making an investment of 15 million euros—about $16 million—which will convert into equity in Mistral upon its next funding round.

The partnership could signal a willingness on the part of Microsoft to branch out beyond its blockbuster partnership with OpenAI, to which it has reportedly committed $13 billion. Despite being a little less than a year old, Mistral has already raised a whopping $563 million at a valuation of over $2 billion, according to Pitchbook.

To open, or not to open: While Mistral has built some of its nascent reputation on a commitment to open-weight models—or LLM releases that make more code freely available—the company is notably not making weights available for its new Mistral Large.

Keep reading here.—PK

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When you pull into the fast-food drive-thru, you’re probably not thinking about the complicated logistics dance that enabled your afternoon pick-me-up.

Now, an autonomous truck could be part of the equation for a limited number of people in the Southwest US.

Kodiak Robotics, the Mountain View, California-based autonomous-trucking startup, announced on Thursday the start of a new delivery route for global logistics company Martin Brower, which counts McDonald’s and Chick-fil-A among its customers.

• As Kodiak founder and CEO Don Burnette put it in a press release, “Your next order of fries may have traveled on a Kodiak truck.”

On the road again: Kodiak already has completed 600 trips for Martin Brower since 2022; the start of delivery runs between Dallas and Oklahoma City eight times a week is an expansion of the companies’ partnership and marks another step toward Kodiak commercializing its technology. The startup aims to begin driverless operations later this year after testing its technology on highways with human drivers on board.

The new route for Martin Brower will initially include safety drivers and eventually go driverless.

Keep reading here.—JG

One of the biggest deterrents for the EV-curious is that plug-in cars simply remain more expensive than their gas-powered cousins.

There are signs that this EV price gap is shrinking.

The average price for a new EV in January was $55,353—still more than the average new-vehicle transaction price of $47,401, but 10.8% lower than EV prices a year ago, according to a recent Kelley Blue Book analysis.

“EV prices have come down significantly in the US in the past year, led by price cuts at Tesla,” Mark Strand, senior director of business intelligence at Cox Automotive (which owns KBB), said in a statement.

EV incentives have been on the rise, KBB noted, increasing “more than three-fold in the past year,” as automakers try to juice sales amid a slowdown. In January 2023, for example, the VW ID.4’s average incentive package was equal to about 6% of ATP; a year later, that rate climbed to nearly 17%.

Sharp curve ahead: A big factor has been Tesla’s aggressive price cuts, which sparked a price war—leading to concerns about used-vehicle values plunging and making it even harder for competitors to reach profitability.

• KBB noted that prices for the Model Y, the sector’s best-selling model, fell more than 21% in the last year, dipping below $50,000 in January
• Last week, Ford cut prices on its Mustang Mach-E lineup by as much as $8,000. The reductions bring some versions of the EV under $40,000 for the first time, The Verge reported.
• Earlier this month, EV startup Lucid lowered the starting price on its Air model.

Yet another EV startup, Rivian, recently slashed prices across its lineup. Underscoring the sector’s challenges, Rivian said last week that it would lay off 10% of its salaried workforce in an attempt to bring down costs after it reported losing $5.4 billion in 2023.

Keep reading here.—JG

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Usually, we write about the business of tech. Here, we highlight the *tech* of tech.

Promises ring: At this year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona (MWC), Samsung shared the design of a future wearable product, the Galaxy Ring, which the company says could help users discover sleep habits, and maybe other things. There isn’t much to say before it’s on the market, as consumers haven’t tested it, but CNET’s Andrew Lanxon took the best close-up photos we could find. Self-care has never looked more rechargeable.

Lenovo-riche: Lenovo showed a conceptual laptop to MWC attendees that’s clearly interesting. Called Project Crystal, much of the laptop’s screen is transparent—literally. As Wired reviews editor Julian Chokkattu noted, it may be part of a trend of see-through tech.