Engineers from Microsoft and the Chinese company ByteDance have announced a collaboration on the KubeRay project. According to CNBC, the software is designed to help companies use AI applications more effectively.

ByteDance engineer Jaxin Shan and Microsoft programmer Ali Canso shared the details of the project at the Ray Summit event in San Francisco. They discussed their progress with experts and developers interested in developing applications using Ray’s open source software.

Shang and Kanso explained the technical details of KubeRay and talked about the benefits of the software for designing AI applications running on multiple computers simultaneously.

“Jiaxin and I have been working on an open source project for a year. […]. We are not in the same company, but we meet every week.”

Experts say collaboration between tech giants on open source software is common practice. However, the Microsoft and ByteDance lawsuit stands out against the backdrop of increased competition between the US and China in the field of AI and intellectual property.

Previously, companies had experience of cooperation. In 2020, Microsoft wanted to buy TikTok from ByteDance at a time when former US President Donald Trump threatened to ban the app for security reasons.

A year later, CEO Satya Nadella called the failed deal “the weirdest thing” he’s ever worked on.

Recall that in August Oracle launched a test of algorithms and content moderation models on TikTok for manipulation by Chinese authorities.

In July 2020, the hacker group Anonymous accused TikTok of mass-tracking users and transferring data to Chinese authorities.