Elon Musk Latest Move in AI Warfare: Grok Chatbot Set to Go Open Source

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In a move that escalated the battle for control of the future of AI, Elon Musk released the raw computer code behind his version of an AI chatbot on Sunday.

Grok, which is designed to give snarky replies in the style of the science fiction novel “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” is a product from xAI, the company Elon Musk started last year. Even though xAI is separate from X, its technology is built into the social media site and learns from what users share. People who pay for X’s special features can ask Grok questions and get answers.

By “open sourcing” the code so that anyone could see and use it, Elon Musk added to a heated argument in the AI world about whether this would make the technology safer or just make it easier for people to abuse.

Musk, who says he supports open source, did the same thing with X’s recommendation system last year, but he hasn’t changed it since.

” Still work to do, but this platform is already by far the most transparent & truth-seeking ” Elon Musk wrote on Sunday in answer to a comment about making X’s recommendation algorithm public.

The move to open-source chatbot code is the latest blow between Elon Musk and OpenAI, the company that made ChatGPT. Musk recently sued OpenAI for breaking a promise to do the same thing, which led to this lawsuit. Elon Musk helped start OpenAI and raised money for it before leaving a few years later. He has said that such a big technology shouldn’t be handled only by tech giants like Microsoft and Google, which is a close partner of OpenAI. OpenAI has said that it will try to get the lawsuit thrown out.

Since the technology became very famous last year, there has been a lot of debate about open sourcing generative A.I., which can make realistic images and videos and text responses that look and sound like they were written by a person. There are strong disagreements in Silicon Valley about whether or not the code that powers A.I. should be open to the public. Some engineers say that the powerful technology should be kept safe from outsiders, while others say that the pros of openness outweigh the cons.

By making his A.I. code public, Musk clearly placed himself in the latter group, which could help him get ahead of competitors who have already started working on the technology.

Once the code is made public, it can be used by other companies and independent software Developers to make changes to and build their own chatbots and other AI systems. Meta has also made its AI technology, called LLaMA, public. Meta is the parent company of both Facebook and Instagram. Open sourcing has also been done by Google and Mistral, a well-known French start-up.

Elon Musk started xAI last year with the goal of helping computers “understand reality.” He also owns X and SpaceX and is the CEO of Tesla. He told investors in his $44 billion deal to take X private in November that they would own a 25% share in xAI.

Musk has said that chatbots should be able to talk about anything. He has criticised companies that guide their technology away from controversial issues as “woke.”

In a post on Friday, Elon Musk said, “If an AI is programmed to push for diversity at all costs, as Google Gemini was, then it will do whatever it can to cause that outcoem, potentially even killing people.”

There is, however, some talk about open sourcing that is directly linked to business goals. One of the most powerful and well-known chatbots on the market, OpenAI, doesn’t have much reason to share its code with the public.

On the other hand, Elon Musk and xAI are trying to catch up. They could help level the playing field by making their code public and letting others improve the technology.

A professor of computer science at Arizona State University named Subbarao Kambhampati has said that the best way to use today’s AI technology is to make it open source. However, he said that firms such as xAI and Meta were not always making the technology public for that reason.

Referring to Meta’s top AI scientist, “Elon Musk and Yann LeCun are not the best messengers for this argument,” he said.