Microsoft's cloud artificial intelligence business was on track to earn $1 billion in annual revenue, according to Information, but the report notes that TikTok You may not need these capabilities as intensely if you develop your own large language model (LLM).
Last year, my colleague Alex Heath reported that TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, was “secretly using” OpenAI technology to create its own LLM:
This practice is widely considered a faux pas in the ai world. It also directly violates OpenAI policy. Terms of Servicewhich states that the output of its model cannot be used “to develop any artificial intelligence model that competes with our products and services.” Microsoft, through which ByteDance is buying its access to OpenAI, has the same policy.
Microsoft also has a multi-million dollar investment deal that makes it the exclusive cloud provider for OpenAI and has spent “several hundred million dollars” building a supercomputer to power ChatGPT. In its fourth quarter 2024 earnings report released Tuesday, Microsoft revealed Azure revenue growth of 29 percent, just below the 30 to 31 percent projected in its last earnings report. CFO Amy Hood said that in the first quarter of 2025, Microsoft anticipates Azure revenue growth of about 28 to 29 percent.
