Elon Musk’s xAI to Open-Source Grok Amidst OpenAI Lawsuit

Elon Musk today announced that his artificial intelligence firm, xAI, will open-source its chatbot, Grok, this week.

This week, @xAI will open source Grok

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 11, 2024

This move comes amidst a lawsuit Musk filed against OpenAI, a U.S.-based AI research lab he co-founded in 2015. In the suit, Musk accused OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, of deviating from its original nonprofit mission by prioritizing profit through Microsoft. The lawsuit seeks to force OpenAI to make its research and technology public.

Grok, a rival to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, launched to a small group of users in November 2023. xAI designed the chatbot to respond to prompts with real-time knowledge of the world through the X platform.

Musk’s decision to make Grok open-source could allow the public to freely explore and experiment with the technology’s source code. This move aligns xAI with companies like the Technology Innovation Institute (Falcon180B), Meta (Llama), and Mistral. Their AI models are open to the public.

Making Grok open-source could allow developers to contribute to the project and accelerate Grok’s development and adoption. However, Musk has acknowledged that it might take a while before xAI reaches the level of OpenAI.

Musk’s commitment to open-source technology is evident in his various ventures, including Tesla, which has some of its patents open-sourced. Just a year after he acquired Twitter, Musk announced in a tweet that some of the social media giant’s algorithms could be made public.