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.
Microsoft confirms supplying AI to Israeli military, denies use in Gaza attacks
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.
“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 to lay off about 3% of workforce
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.