Microsoft Adds Elon Musk’s Grok 3 AI to Azure for Healthcare and Science
Grok 3, xAI’s flagship large language model (LLM), is designed to advance AI innovation and accelerate scientific discovery.
Microsoft has announced integrating Elon Musk’s AI startup xAI’s Grok 3 model into its Azure platform.
Grok 3 and Grok 3 mini will be accessible through Azure’s AI Foundry platform, which supports developers in creating and managing enterprise-ready AI applications.
Grok 3, xAI’s flagship large language model (LLM), is designed to advance AI innovation and accelerate scientific discovery.
According to the companies, the model was trained on “xAI’s Colossus supercluster with 10x the compute power of prior leading models.” Microsoft stated that Grok 3 excels in mathematics, instruction-following, coding, reasoning, and world knowledge, with “deep domain expertise in numerous sectors, including healthcare and science.” The model offers medical diagnosis support and scientific research assistance.
The model will be available for a free two-week preview. Afterward, Grok 3 (Global) will cost $3 for one million input tokens and $15 for one million output tokens.
Grok 3 (DataZone) is slightly higher priced at $3.30 per million input tokens and $16.50 per million output tokens. It is also accessible on GitHub. Microsoft’s Foundry platform hosts other NVIDIA, Meta, Cohere, and OpenAI AI models.
Microsoft noted, “This collaboration combines xAI’s cutting-edge models with Azure’s enterprise-ready infrastructure, giving developers access to Grok 3’s advanced capabilities in a secure, scalable environment. Grok models enable a range of enterprise scenarios with advanced reasoning, coding, and visual processing capabilities.”
Regulatory Scrutiny Over Medical Use and Data Privacy
In November, Elon Musk encouraged users on X (formerly Twitter) to “try submitting X-ray, PET, MRI, or other medical images to Grok for analysis.” Musk noted that while the feature was “still in an early stage, it is already quite accurate and will become extremely good.” He invited users to report where Grok “gets it right or needs work.”
However, Grok’s ability to generate medical diagnoses has raised concerns among experts and regulators. European privacy authorities have questioned whether Grok’s data processing complies with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
On April 11, the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) launched an inquiry into xAI’s use of Europeans’ data for training Grok. The investigation is focused on whether publicly accessible posts on X are being used without consent to train the model.
xAI initially introduced its Grok-1 chatbot in November 2023, describing it as “designed to answer questions with a bit of wit and has a rebellious streak.”
