Elon Musk, despite being embroiled in a lawsuit with Microsoft and OpenAI, made a virtual appearance at Microsoft’s Build developer conference in Seattle. Musk’s Grok AI chatbot will now be hosted on Microsoft Azure’s cloud platform.
“It’s fantastic to have you at our developer conference,” Nadella said during a pre-recorded conversation with Musk.
The partnership puts Musk’s Grok AI on the same platform as rival models from OpenAI, Meta Platforms, and other global AI developers such as Mistral, DeepSeek, and Black Forest Labs.
Legal feud doesn’t stall collaboration
Musk’s appearance came as a surprise, given his ongoing legal battle with Microsoft and OpenAI. Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015 but later parted ways and has since been critical of the company’s direction and its close ties with Microsoft. In 2023, he filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, accusing it of abandoning its founding principles and turning into a profit-driven enterprise.
Musk now runs his own artificial intelligence firm, xAI, which launched Grok as a direct competitor to OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Grok’s recent controversy not mentioned
The announcement came just days after xAI was forced to fix Grok following user complaints that the chatbot repeatedly brought up racially sensitive topics, including “white genocide” and South African politics. The company later blamed the issue on an “unauthorized modification” by an employee. Musk, who was born in South Africa and has himself commented on such topics, did not address the incident during his exchange with Nadella.
Instead, Musk emphasised the importance of transparency in AI development: “We have and will make mistakes, but we aspire to correct them very quickly,” Musk said, adding that honesty is “the best policy” for AI safety.
OpenAI’s Sam Altman also takes the stage
Earlier at the same conference, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman also appeared in a separate live video chat with Nadella. Microsoft remains OpenAI’s biggest financial and infrastructure partner, integrating its tools across products like Bing and GitHub.
GitHub launches AI coding agent amid layoffs
Meanwhile, Microsoft-owned GitHub used the Build event to unveil a new AI “agent” to assist programmers. Unlike the existing Copilot assistant, the new tool is designed to autonomously handle more complex tasks within existing codebases.
It’s meant to “take care of boring tasks” so developers can “focus on the interesting work,” according to GitHub’s announcement. The agent is optimised for “low-to-medium complexity” tasks in well-tested software environments.
The upbeat announcements come just a week after Microsoft began laying off around 6,000 employees globally — about 3% of its workforce.