As a lawsuit against competitor AI chatbot maker OpenAI intensifies, Elon Musk of xAI declared that the company would release the source code for its artificial intelligence (AI) model Grok.Grok will be available for download this week, according to a March 11 X post from Musk.
Despite not going into detail about his intentions to make Grok open source, Musk received a lot of good feedback for his move in the comments section of his post.“OpenAI should do the same,” one user retorted.“OpenAI is a lie,” Musk retorted, “if they are ‘open’ that is.”
Musk sued OpenAI on February 29th, alleging that the nonprofit company had broken a deal when it was established.He contends that the nonprofit organization’s guiding ideals—advancing open-source artificial general intelligence (AGI) for the good of humanity—are violated by OpenAI’s collaboration with Microsoft.By the end of 2023, Microsoft was said to have invested close to $3 billion in OpenAI.In the case, Musk asks for an injunction to prevent the for-profit use of AGI technology and exhorts OpenAI to revert to its original open-source principles.But in a joint statement released a few days after the lawsuit was filed, OpenAI executives disclosed emails in which Musk seemed to support the company’s move to become a for-profit business.
Following his dismissal and rehire in November 2023, OpenAI has rehired CEO Sam Altman as a member of its board since the complaint was filed.The board said at the time that they were unaware of how much the company would become unstable in his absence.In line with his demands in his lawsuit against OpenAI, Musk has decided to make Grok open source in order to further open-source artificial intelligence for the “benefit of humanity.”
Similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT bot, Musk’s startup xAI created the AI chatbot Grok.Grok, on the other hand, can respond to more pressing queries that some other AI systems decline to answer and can obtain real-time information through the X social media platform than ChatGPT.Users need to have an authenticated X account in order to utilize the chatbot.Some comparisons show that while Grok AI, which is based on the Grok-1 large language model, outperforms ChatGPT-3.5, it falls short of OpenAi’s ChatGPT-4 model.