Last week, a detailed report by Bloomberg detailed the complicated nature of Microsoft and OpenAI’s multi-billion-dollar partnership, including Microsoft’s AI safety net if something “catastrophic” happens to OpenAI.
Microsoft’s admission that Copilot is synonymous with ChatGPT but with better security, and that its allegiance isn’t to OpenAI, but to availing whatever AI customers want via Azure for maximum profit gains.
During Microsoft’s annual Build developer conference, the company announced that xAI’s Grok 3 and Grok 3 mini are joining Azure’s long list of AI models. “These models will have all the service level agreements (SLAs) Azure customers expect from any Microsoft product,” added Microsoft.
Elon Musk touted the AI chatbot as the most powerful AI service by every metric and the “most fun”, too. Its fans seemingly share the same sentiments, often referring to Grok as “the most based and uncensored model of its class yet.”
It’s worth noting that Elon Musk’s Grok AI models will be hosted and billed directly by Microsoft. What’s more, the tech giant will now be able to avail the service to its product teams and services via its Azure AI Foundry service.
As you may know, Elon Musk and Sam Altman have a long-standing rivalry from OpenAI’s early founding days. The Tesla CEO and billionaire filed two lawsuits against the ChatGPT makers, Greg Brockman and Sam Altman, citing a stark betrayal of its founding mission and alleged involvement in racketeering activities and a fake humanitarian mission.
As such, Microsoft hosting Elon Musk’s Grok AI in Azure could likely raise tension and controversy in its partnership with OpenAI.
Interestingly, OpenAI’s partnership with Microsoft has seemingly been fraying over the past few months, especially after the ChatGPT maker unveiled its $500 Stargate project, designed to facilitate the construction of data centers across the United States.
The project cost Microsoft its exclusive cloud provider status for OpenAI. Consequently, Microsoft reportedly pulled out of two mega data center deals that would have helped to provide additional training support for ChatGPT.
However, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman indicated that the company is no longer “compute-constrained,” suggesting that it is capable of facilitating its sophisticated AI advances.
