‘You were a PC gamer then': Satya Nadella and Elon Musk revisit Tesla CEO's internship days during Grok's Azure debut
In a significant development for the artificial intelligence sector, Elon Musk's xAI has announced the integration of its latest Grok 3 models into Microsoft Azure, one of the world's leading cloud computing platforms. The news was unveiled during a light-hearted yet insightful exchange between Musk and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella at the Microsoft Build developer conference.
As part of the initiative, the Grok 3 models will be available free of charge throughout June via the Azure AI Foundry. This platform also features advanced AI offerings from key industry players such as OpenAI, Meta, and Hugging Face.
Welcoming Grok to the Azure ecosystem, Nadella took a nostalgic detour into Musk's early days in tech. 'I know you started off as an intern at Microsoft,' Nadella remarked, referring to Musk's formative experience as a Windows developer. 'You were a PC gamer then—and still are.'
Musk responded with a grin, reminiscing about his beginnings. 'I actually started before Windows—with DOS. I worked on the earliest IBM PCs running MS-DOS. They had just 128k of memory, and when that doubled to 256k, it was a major leap,' he said. Musk also recalled programming video games during that era, well before the arrival of Windows 3.1.
The exchange, which was widely shared on social media, offered a rare personal glimpse into Musk's programming roots, even as the focus remained firmly on the future of AI.
Nadella praised the Grok models as 'a family of models that are both responsive and capable of reasoning,' expressing enthusiasm about their potential impact within Azure's AI infrastructure.
Musk elaborated on the philosophy behind the Grok 3.5 model, which is engineered to reason from first principles. 'If you're trying to reach fundamental truths, it boils down to identifying axiomatic elements that are most likely to be correct—and reasoning from there,' he explained. 'The focus of Grok 3.5 is fundamental physics and applying those tools across reasoning domains, aspiring to truth with minimal error.'
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