Elon Musk makes xAI’s Grok chatbot open source while he is in court with OpenAI

Elon Musk makes xAI’s Grok chatbot open source while he is in court with OpenAI.

The stunning news came from tech mogul Elon Musk on Monday: his AI startup, xAI, will be releasing “Grok,” a competitor to ChatGPT, as open-source software later this week. This news comes just a few days after Musk sued OpenAI, saying that it had changed its original mission to help people in need in favor of strategies that focused on making money.

Musk is known for publicly criticizing tech companies like Google for making money off of technology. Earlier this month, he sued OpenAI, a company he co-founded in 2015 but stopped working with three years later. In a dramatic turn of events, OpenAI responded by releasing emails that showed Musk’s support for a business-focused approach and a possible merger with Tesla, which suggested he had other goals.

“This week, @xAI will open source Grok,” Musk wrote on his social media site X.

Making this change aligns xAI with companies like Meta and France’s Mistral, which both support open-source AI models and let the public see how Grok works. Google has also jumped in with its Gemma AI model, which lets people outside Google make changes.

Since Musk’s legal challenge, tech investors like Vinod Khosla, who supports OpenAI, and Marc Andreessen of Andreessen Horowitz have had heated arguments about what open-sourcing AI means. Some people support AI because they say it leads to new ideas, but others are worried that it could be abused, especially by bad people who want to use AI as a weapon.

Musk said at Britain’s AI Safety Summit last year that he wanted to set up a regulatory body to monitor AI development and step in if there were ethical concerns.

Musk started xAI last year as an alternative to OpenAI and Google. His goal is to create what he calls a “maximum truth-seeking AI.” Grok was first made available to X Premium+ subscribers in December.

Musk intimated that he liked open-source AI in a podcast with computer scientist and podcaster Lex Fridman.

When the project first began, it was a non-profit, and “open” in OpenAI meant “open source.” “Now,” Musk said, “it has transitioned to closed-source to maximise profits.”