Microsoft Corporation (MSFT.US) expands its AI ecosystem: Introducing Musk's Grok 3 and other models into its cloud platform.

Microsoft Corporation (MSFT.US) is integrating Elon Musk's xAI model into its artificial intelligence platform. Microsoft Corporation announced on Monday that Grok 3, developed by Musk's AI team earlier this year, will be used on Microsoft Corporation's cloud computing platform. In January, Microsoft Corporation stated that its AI suite - including cloud infrastructure and AI applications - is expected to bring in at least $13 billion in annual revenue. Microsoft Corporation, along with its biggest competitors in renting computing power such as Amazon.com, Inc. (AMZN.US) and Alphabet Inc. Class C (GOOGL.US), are all vying to become platforms for building and deploying AI applications. This has turned the competition for having the latest models and establishing complex controls to manage their use into a battlefield. Microsoft Corporation stated that Azure cloud service customers can use over 1900 AI models, including models from their closely aligned partners OpenAI, Meta (META.US), and DeepSeek. Musk's model adds to the selection but still has significant gaps, including models from Alphabet Inc. Class C and popular AI startup company Anthropic. At Microsoft Corporation's annual Build developer conference on Monday, many announcements focused on products being developed to help manage agents, which are AI tools designed to act on behalf of users. The company stated that PC operating system Windows and other Microsoft Corporation products will support Anthropic's Model Context Protocol, a set of standards developed by the startup company to manage how AI systems interact. Microsoft Corporation's Chief Technology Officer Kevin Scott said in a speech at the company's headquarters in Redmond, Washington on Sunday, "For intelligent assistants to be most effective, they need to be able to converse with anything in the world." Microsoft Corporation and its subsidiary GitHub coding platform have also joined the MCP steering committee. Microsoft Corporation has established a leadership position in AI tools, partly due to its significant investment in the manufacturer of ChatGPT, OpenAI. The company is injecting AI into its products aimed at enterprise office workers and developers, betting on systems that can integrate intelligence and automation into the workplace to make up for the hundreds of billions spent on servers and data centers to power these products. Microsoft Corporation has also rolled out various products aimed at providing developers and businesses with additional insights and generating building blocks for AI. This includes a leaderboard for best-performing models, a tool designed to help developers automatically select the right model for specific tasks, and a new product for companies looking to build their own AI models using internal data. Grok 3 and Grok 3 mini of xAI will be available on Microsoft Corporation's Azure AI Foundry. These models also power a chatbot Siasun Robot & Automation connected to Musk's social media site X, which last week spent some time on X exposing a conspiracy theory about "white genocide" in South Africa. xAI later stated that Grok's X Siasun Robot & Automation had been "unauthorizedly altered" and promised to increase transparency in guiding software prompts. During Microsoft Corporation CEO Satya Nadella's keynote speech at the conference, Musk made a surprise appearance. Musk stated that he hopes developers can provide feedback on the Grok AI model. Musk said, "We've made mistakes, and we will make mistakes, and we are eager to correct them as quickly as possible." Nadella's speech was also interrupted by protesters within the first few minutes. Last month, Microsoft Corporation fired two employees for disrupting an event protesting Microsoft Corporation's cooperation with the Israeli government.