Microsoft integrates Musk’s Grok AI models into Azure Cloud platform

REDMOND, WASHINGTON: Grok 3, which Musk’s AI outfit introduced earlier this year, will be available on Microsoft’s cloud-computing platform, the company said on Monday.

Microsoft and its biggest rivals in selling rented computing power, including Amazon.com Inc. and Google, are vying to be the place where AI applications are built and deployed. That has made a battleground out of the competition to host the latest models and build sophisticated controls to manage how they’re used.

Microsoft’s Azure cloud service customers can tap into more than 1,900 variants of AI models, including those from the company’s close partner, OpenAI, as well as Meta Platforms Inc., and DeepSeek, Microsoft said. The addition of Musk’s models increases the selection, but there remain notable absences, including models from Alphabet Inc.’s Google and hot AI startup Anthropic.

Microsoft wants AI ‘agents’ to work together and remember things

Many of announcements at Monday’s start of Build, Microsoft annual developer conference, centred on products the company is building to help manage agents, or AI tools designed to take action on a user’s behalf. The company said Windows, the ubiquitous PC operating system, and other Microsoft products would support Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol, a set of standards the startup build to govern how AI systems interact.

“In order for agents to be as useful as they could be, they need to be able to talk to everything in the world,” Microsoft Chief Technology Officer Kevin Scott said Sunday during a presentation at its Redmond, Washington-based headquarters.

Microsoft has staked a position as a leader in artificial intelligence tools, thanks in part to its massive investment in OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT. The company has infused AI into its products for corporate office workers and developers, betting that systems that can sprinkle intelligence and automation into the workplace will more than make up for the tens of billions Microsoft has spent on servers and data centres to power those products.

Microsoft also introduced a variety of products designed to give developers and businesses additional insight and building blocks for generative AI. That includes a leader board of the top performing models, a tool designed to automatically help developers select the right model for a particular task and new products for companies that want to build their own AI models using their internal data.

Musk appeared virtually during Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella’s keynote speech at the conference. He said he is hoping for developer feedback on Grok AI models. “We have and will make mistakes, and aspire to correct them very quickly,” he said.