Microsoft, ByteDance Working together on AI Project

Engineers from US-based Microsoft and China's ByteDance, creator of TikTok, are working together on the KubeRay project, which should help companies manage AI applications more effectively despite a battle for supremacy in artificial intelligence.

At this week's Ray Summit in San Francisco, ByteDance software engineer Jiaxin Shan and Microsoft principal software engineer Ali Kanso discussed their progress with data scientists, machine learning experts and other developers interested in building applications using open source Ray software.

Shan and Kanso explained some of the technical points behind KubeRay and passed on the benefits of the software for developing AI applications running on multiple computers.

Jiaxin and I have been working on an open source project for about a year now, and that's the beauty of community meetings like this. We don't work in the same company, but we meet every week, we collaborate every week,

said Kanso.

Many companies often partner and share engineering resources to participate in open source projects, which have been gaining popularity in recent years and giving rise to numerous start-ups. Given the tensions between the US and China, Microsoft and ByteDance's collaboration raises some concerns about the use of technological advances for surveillance and invasion of privacy. However, that has not stopped the US company from collaborating with China.

Microsoft is investing heavily in AI alongside companies such as Amazon, Google, Meta and Apple and even has an AI research lab in China, to attract that country's scientific talent.

Amid TikTok's growing user base in recent years, ByteDance has been active in various open-source AI projects. In 2020, ByteDance unveiled the NeurST suite of software tools for speech translation using artificial intelligence. And last year, the company debuted open source enterprise software with CloudWeGo.

Recall that Microsoft tried to acquire TikTok from ByteDance, while then-President Donald Trump threatened to ban the app in the US in 2020.