Elon Musk, who's suing Microsoft, is also software giant's special guest
in new Grok AI partnership
[May 20, 2025] By
MATT O'BRIEN
Elon Musk is in a legal fight with Microsoft but made a friendly virtual
appearance at the software giant's annual technology showcase to reveal
that his Grok artificial intelligence chatbot will now be hosted on
Microsoft's data centers.
“It’s fantastic to have you at our developer conference,” Microsoft CEO
Satya Nadella said to Musk in a pre-recorded video conversation
broadcast Monday at Microsoft's Build conference in Seattle.
Musk last year sued Microsoft and its close business partner OpenAI in a
dispute over Musk's foundational contributions to OpenAI, which Musk
helped start. Musk now runs his own AI company, xAI, maker of Grok, a
competitor to OpenAI's ChatGPT.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman also spoke with Nadella via live video call
earlier at Monday's conference.
Musk's deal means that the latest versions of xAI's Grok models will be
hosted on Microsoft's Azure cloud computing platform, alongside
competing models from OpenAI and other companies, including Facebook
parent Meta Platforms, Europe-based AI startups Mistral and Black Forest
Labs and Chinese company DeepSeek.
The Grok partnership comes just days after xAI had to fix the chatbot to
stop it from repeatedly bringing up South African racial politics and
the subject of “white genocide” in public interactions with users of
Musk's social media platform X. The company blamed an employee's
“unauthorized modification” for the unsolicited commentary, which
mirrored South Africa-born Musk's own focus on the topic.
Musk didn't address last week's controversy in his chat with Nadella but
described honesty as the “best policy” for AI safety.
“We have and will make mistakes, but we aspire to correct them very
quickly,” Musk said.
Nadella was interrupted by protest over Gaza
Monday's Build conference also became the latest Microsoft event to be
interrupted by a protest over the company's work with the Israeli
government. Microsoft has previously fired employees who protested
company events, including its 50th anniversary party in April.
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A Microsoft sign and logo are pictured at the company's
headquarters, Friday, April 4, 2025, in Redmond, Wash. (AP
Photo/Jason Redmond, File)
“Satya, how about you show how Microsoft is killing Palestinians?" a
protesting employee shouted in the first minutes of Nadella's
introductory talk Monday. "How about you show how Israeli war crimes are
powered by Azure?”
Nadella continued his presentation as the protesters were escorted out.
Microsoft acknowledged last week that it provided AI services to the
Israeli military for the war in Gaza but said it has found no evidence
to date that its Azure platform and AI technologies were used to target
or harm people in Gaza.
Microsoft didn't immediately return an emailed request for comment about
the protest Monday.
Microsoft introduces new AI coding agent
Microsoft-owned GitHub also used the Seattle gathering to introduce a
new AI coding “agent” to help programmers build new software.
The company already offers a Copilot coding assistant but the promise of
so-called AI agents is that they can do more work on their own on a
user's behalf. The updated tool is supposed to work best on tasks of
“low-to-medium complexity” in codebases that are already well-tested,
handling “boring tasks” while people “focus on the interesting work,”
according to Microsoft's announcement.
The new tool arrives just a week after Microsoft began laying off
hundreds of its own software engineers in Washington's Puget Sound
region as part of global cuts of nearly 3% of its total workforce,
amounting to about 6,000 workers.
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