In a surprising move, Elon Musk appeared at Microsoft's big AI conference this week, even though he's currently suing the company.
Musk joined Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella in a pre-recorded video at the Build 2025 event to announce a major partnership. His AI company, xAI, will now use Microsoft's powerful Azure cloud system to host Grok, its new chatbot.
"It's incredibly important for AI models to be grounded in reality," Musk said. "We aspire to truth with minimal error."
This announcement came just days after xAI fixed a major issue with Grok. According to AP News, the chatbot had given strange and offensive answers about South Africa, including mentions of "white genocide."
The company blamed the problem on an "unauthorized modification" by an employee and promised to do better with safety and oversight.
Musk didn't mention the controversy during the Microsoft event but did say, "We have and will make mistakes, but we aspire to correct them very quickly."
His appearance was even more unexpected because of an ongoing lawsuit he filed last year against Microsoft and its AI partner OpenAI.
Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015 but later left the company and has criticized its direction. He now leads xAI, which competes directly with OpenAI's popular ChatGPT.
Elon Musk is against OpenAI, and Microsoft backs OpenAI.
— Amit Misra (@amit6060) May 20, 2025
Now, Microsoft is partnering with Elon Musk by adding his AI startup xAI's Grok 3 to its Azure platform.
What's going on? Are they fooling us?😅pic.twitter.com/M6bXtzy0KD
Grok Joins OpenAI and Meta Models on Microsoft's Azure Platform
Despite their legal fight, Microsoft is now hosting Grok models alongside other major AI tools, including OpenAI, Meta's Llama, and models from DeepSeek and Mistral, on its Azure AI platform.
During the event, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman also spoke with Nadella about their latest work together.
While not mentioning Musk directly, Altman highlighted how AI tools are becoming like "virtual teammates" that can help developers complete coding tasks, Inquirer said.
Also at the event, GitHub, a Microsoft-owned platform, introduced a new AI coding assistant. This updated tool is designed to handle simple and routine software jobs, letting developers focus on harder problems.
However, the conference didn't go smoothly from start to finish. Just minutes into Nadella's speech, a protester shouted accusations about Microsoft's AI work being used in the Gaza conflict. The protester was quickly removed, and Nadella continued with the presentation.
Microsoft said last week that it provides AI services to the Israeli military but found no evidence they were used to harm people in Gaza.
This year's Build event comes shortly after Microsoft began laying off nearly 6,000 workers.
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