Musk to open source xAI’s ChatGPT challenger Grok

Elon Musk said on Monday his artificial intelligence (AI) start-up xAI would open-source its ChatGPT challenger Grok this week, days after he sued OpenAI for abandoning its original mission in favour of a for-profit model.

The billionaire has warned on several occasions against the use of technology for profit by big technology companies such as Google.

He filed the lawsuit against Microsoft-backed OpenAI, which he cofounded in 2015 but left three years later, last week.

“This week, @xAI will open source Grok,” Musk said in a post on X, the social media firm he owns. The move could give the public free access to experiment with the code behind the technology and aligns xAI with firms such as Meta and France’s Mistral, both of which have open-source AI models.

Google has also released an AI model called Gemma that outside developers can potentially fashion according to their needs.

Tech investors including OpenAI backer Vinod Khosla and Marc Andreessen, cofounder of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, have been debating about opensourcing in AI since Musk filed the lawsuit against the ChatGPT maker. While open-sourcing technology can help speed up innovations, some experts have warned that open-source AI models could be used by terrorists to create chemical weapons or even develop a superintelligence beyond human control.

Musk said at Britain’s AI Safety Summit in 2023 that he wanted to establish a “third-party referee” that could oversee firms developing AI and sound the alarm if they have concerns.

Seeking an alternative to OpenAI and Google, Musk launched xAI in 2023 to create what he said would be a “maximum truth-seeking AI”.

In December, the start-up rolled out Grok for Premium+ subscribers of X. In a podcast with computer scientist and podcaster Lex Fridman, Musk suggested in November that he favoured open-source AI.

“The name, the open in open AI, is supposed to mean open source, and it was created as a nonprofit open source,” he said.

THIS COMES JUST DAYS AFTER SUING OPENAI FOR ABANDONING ITS ORIGINAL MISSION IN FAVOUR OF A FORPROFIT MODEL