Elon Musk has promised to open source the Grok chatbot, created by xAI, the artificial intelligence company founded by the billionaire in 2023. Earlier this month, Musk filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, accusing the company of abandoning its mission to contribute to the development of humanity and seeking only profit. OpenAI doesn’t open up its models.
Musk communicated the decision on X (formerly Twitter): “This week, xAI will open source Grok.” For now, there are no further details of how this will happen, nor which parts of the model will be released.
Grok was launched in November 2023. It promises less censored responses than ChatGPT and other competitors, as well as being updated in real time, thanks to the collection of posts from users of X. Still in the testing phase, the chatbot is available to subscribers of the Premium+ package of the X social network in select countries.
Other companies have also been trying to make their models available to the general public. This is the case of Meta and the French startup Mistral. Google has also released the Gemma model, which is less powerful than Gemini, to developers. OpenAI, on the other hand, has not adopted this practice.
Musk accuses OpenAI of betraying mission
Earlier in the month, xAI’s owner filed a lawsuit against OpenAI. He accuses the company, CEO Sam Altman and chairman Greg Brockman of abandoning the company’s original mission: to create artificial intelligence for the good of humanity.
Musk is one of the co-founders of OpenAI, but stepped away from the institution in 2018. He says he helped with the foundation and funding under the promise that the models developed would be made available for free.
However, the entrepreneur believes that the company has become, in practice, a subsidiary of Microsoft. He wants Altman, Brockman and Microsoft to be prevented from making financial benefits from the technologies they develop.
Days later, OpenAI made public emails in which Musk states that the organization would need billions of dollars, and that the only way to achieve this would be to seek new sources of income. In 2019, the non-profit OpenAI created the company OpenAI LP, aiming for profit. Microsoft is one of its biggest investors.