Microsoft will host Elon Musk's Grok in its cloud
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Microsoft said Monday that it is adding Grok — the AI model produced by Elon Musk's xAI — to the growing list of third-party AI models it offers via its cloud service.
Why it matters: Microsoft is trying to convince developers and businesses that its AI strategy is a better bet than those from its partner OpenAI and a slew of competitors, including Google and Amazon.
Driving the news: Microsoft will offer customers the option to run versions of xAI's Grok 3 and Grok 3 mini models hosted and billed directly by Microsoft, the company announced Monday.
- Microsoft says it now offers 1,900 models hosted by itself or its partners.
- The Verge reported earlier this month that the Grok deal was in the works.
State of play: Also at its Build conference on Monday, Microsoft announced a new GitHub coding agent that can work independently on multiple tasks in the background.
- OpenAI announced its Codex agent boasting similar capabilities on Friday.
Microsoft also announced NLWeb, an open project designed to "simplify the creation of natural language interfaces for websites — making it easy to turn any site into an AI-powered app," per a blog post.
- NLWeb will allow websites to build conversational interfaces using "the model of their choice and their own data," Microsoft says.
What they're saying: "This emerging vision of the internet is an open agentic web, where AI agents make decisions and perform tasks on behalf of users or organizations," Microsoft said in its post.
The big picture: It's a busy week of developer conferences.
- In addition to Microsoft's Build event in Seattle, Google hosts its I/O conference Tuesday and Wednesday in Mountain View, while Anthropic will have its first developer conference on Thursday in San Francisco.
