Musk’s xAI Releases Its AI Model Grok To The Open Source Community, But With A Small Tweak

Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence startup, xAI, has made its large language model, Grok, open source, allowing entrepreneurs, programmers, or companies to use the model for their own purposes — but with an alteration.

What Happened: In a blog post on Sunday, xAI announced that Grok’s weights and network architecture are now available for anyone to use for their own applications, including commercial ones.

“We are releasing the base model weights and network architecture of Grok-1, our large language model,” the company stated, adding, “Grok-1 is a 314 billion parameter Mixture-of-Experts model trained from scratch by xAI.”

Grok was open-sourced under Apache License 2.0, allowing commercial use, modifications, and distribution. However, it cannot be trademarked, and users do not receive liability or warranty.

The code for Grok can be downloaded from its Github page or via a torrent link.

See Also: Elon Musk Once Revealed Why He ‘Stopped’ Using TikTok: It’s ‘Probing My Brain’

With 314 billion parameters, Grok surpasses its open-source competitors, such as Meta Platforms Inc.’s META Llama 2 and Mistral 8x7B, according to Venture Beat.

Originally released as a proprietary model in November 2023, Grok was only accessible through Musk’s social network X, formerly Twitter. However, the release does not include the full corpus of its training data or any hookup to the real-time information available on X.

The blog post stated, “base model trained on a large amount of text data, not fine-tuned for any particular task.”

Additionally, it lacks integration with the real-time data accessible on X, a feature Musk originally touted as a significant advantage of Grok compared to other LLMs. To access this functionality, users will still be required to subscribe to the paid version on X, the report noted.

Why It Matters: The open sourcing of Grok is seen as a strategic move by Musk, who co-founded ChatGPT-parent OpenAI in 2015 and later left it in 2018. Grok is designed to rival ChatGPT, which Musk has criticized repeatedly since its maker’s partnership with Microsoft Corporation MSFT.

Some industry experts, such as Deepwater Asset Management’s managing partner Doug Clinton, speculated that the open-sourcing of Grok could be Musk’s strategic response to an ongoing lawsuit with OpenAI. “I think he sort of had to do it given the lawsuit with OpenAI to make a statement.”

Gene Munster, another managing partner at Deepwater, predicted that this move could attract significant funding for xAI and position it as a leading private AI company, directly challenging OpenAI.

“Musk reports that xAI has not and is not raising money, but I believe that will soon change because speed and deep pockets are paramount in the AI race,” he stated previously, adding, “When it does, he’s going to raise boat loads of money fast.”

Photo courtesy: Shutterstock

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Disclaimer: This content was partially produced with the help of Benzinga Neuro and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors.