Musk plans to make xAI chatbot Grok open source

Billionaire businessman Elon Musk has said his artificial intelligence company xAI will make its Grok chatbot open source, as he ramps up his offensive against ChatGPT maker OpenAI.

The move will be made this week, Mr Musk said in a post on social media platform X.

Open sourcing, by definition, means it should be free, including its redistribution. But there are exceptions, for example, if the software is too restrictive and cannot be used for personal use, or if there are trademark considerations involved.

The governing open source definition, published by the Open Source Initiative, focuses on the software’s source licence rather than on what users are free to do.

Richard Stallman, founder of the GNU Project, highlighted this conflicting duality in his blog post titled Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software.

“That causes confusion in paradoxical situations where the source code is open source [and free] but the executable itself is non-free,” he said.

Grok is currently only available to subscribers of X’s Premium+ tier, technically meaning users still have to pay to use Grok’s open-source code, and it is unclear what they can do or how far they can go with their access to Grok.

Mr Musk has been in a bitter public spat with OpenAI since February 29, when he filed a lawsuit against the company.

The case alleges that OpenAI has deviated from its original mission of providing AI access to all and has, instead, pursued profits.

OpenAI has denied the allegations, stating that Mr Musk regrets not being part of the company and its success today, as it has morphed into the leader of the generative AI revolution.

On Monday, Mr Musk continued the row on X, calling OpenAI a “lie”. OpenAI has yet to respond to xAI’s plans for Grok, a generative AI chatbot based on a large language model, the underlying algorithm that uses deep learning and analyses significant amounts of data to generate content.

The xAI website simply describes Grok as a “conversational AI for understanding the universe” – aligned with Mr Musk’s mission statement when he announced in July last year that xAI was meant “to understand reality” and “the true nature of the universe”.

Grok is also “designed to have a little humour in its responses … and loves sarcasm. I have no idea who could have guided it this way”, Mr Musk said.

The website of xAI said Grok would also answer “spicy questions that are rejected by most other AI systems”. While all generative AI chatbots rely on LLMs, Grok has one distinct edge, said Mr Musk. It has real-time access to information via the X social media platform, which is a “massive advantage over other models”, Mr Musk said.

Grok’s main LLM is Grok-1, an evolution of the original Grok-0, which was trained on 33 billion parameters.

Grok-1 has gone through several iterations over the past four months and is “significantly more powerful”, xAI said.

According to xAI, Grok-1 still lags behind OpenAI’s GPT-4 and Anthropic’s Claude 2 in benchmarking statistics.

Mr Musk is no stranger to pushing for open sourcing. During his acquisition of Twitter in 2022, one of his pitches was that he would make the platform’s code open source.

Grok is currently available to subscribers of X’s Premium+ tier, meaning users still have to pay to use its open-source code