Elon Musk Says xAI to Open-Source Grok This Week

In a surprising move, Elon Musk has announced that its AI startup — xAI — will be open-sourcing Grok this week, the company’s large language model. Grok was unveiled inNovember last yearand it’s currently available to Premium+ subscribers (costs $16 per month) on X (formerly Twitter). The Grok chatbot was released as a direct response to OpenAI’sChatGPT, but the model has not shown great promise yet.This week,@xAIwill open source Grok— Elon Musk (@elonmusk)March 11, 2024

This week,@xAIwill open source Grok— Elon Musk (@elonmusk)March 11, 2024

Elon Musk has been outspoken againstaggressive guardrailsthat make the AI models avoid sensitive topics. Therefore, Grok is seen as a culmination of Musk’s vision where the AI chatbot doesn’t shy away from answering political or sensitive questions.

That said, Grok has beenfound to hallucinatea lot on many topics, and even on the political spectrum, it aligned more to the left, something Musk has been vocal against. Now, with the open-source strategy, xAI is putting its confidence in the open-source community to steer the model and improve it significantly.

Meta has been the front-runner in open-sourcing AI models. We recently saw the release ofLlama 2by Meta AI, and Google also released a tiny AI model calledGemma. If xAI chooses to release the weights of the Grok AI model under a fairly reasonableopen-source license, it might drive the community to work and improve the model for different use cases.

I am not sure whether xAI will release Grok with minimal restrictions forcommercial usage. While Llama 2 is open-source, it requires apps and services to get a special license if the user base expands to more than 700 million monthly users. Similarly, xAI may also add similar commercial usage restrictions.To ClosedAI and I will drop the lawsuit— Elon Musk (@elonmusk)March 6, 2024

To ClosedAI and I will drop the lawsuit— Elon Musk (@elonmusk)March 6, 2024

Apart from that,Elon Musk recently sued OpenAIand Sam Altman over OpenAI’s volte-face to become a closed-source company. Musk later said that he would drop the lawsuit if OpenAI changed its name to “ClosedAI“. Perhaps, in that spirit, Elon Musk is open-sourcing Grok which may cement his position on open-sourcing future AI technologies.

Arjun Sha

Passionate about Windows, ChromeOS, Android, security and privacy issues. Have a penchant to solve everyday computing problems.

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