After suing OpenAI this month, accusing the company of being too closed-minded, Elon Musk said he would release his “truth-seeking” answers to ChatGPT, the chatbot Grok, for anyone to download and use.
“This week, @xAI will open source Grok,” Musk wrote today on his social media platform X. This suggests that his artificial intelligence company, xAI, will release Grok’s complete code and allow anyone to use or change it. In contrast, OpenAI makes a version of ChatGPT and the language model behind it available for free, but keeps its code private.
Musk has said little before about Grok or xAI’s business model, and the chatbot is only available to X’s Premium subscribers. Earlier this month, Musk accused the OpenAI co-founder of reneging on a promise to abandon the company’s artificial intelligence, so he may have felt he had to open source his chatbot to show he’s committed to that vision.
OpenAI responded to Musk’s lawsuit last week by releasing email messages between Musk and others in which he appeared to support the idea of making the company’s technology more closed off as it became more powerful. Musk ultimately invested more than $40 million into OpenAI before exiting the project in 2018.
When Musk first announced that Grok was in development, he promised that it would be less politically biased than ChatGPT or other AI models that he and other right-wing viewpoints have criticized as being too liberal. Tests by Wired and others soon showed that while Grok could adopt a provocative style, it wasn’t heavily biased in one way or another—which may shed light on aligning AI models with specific viewpoints. The challenge of staying consistent.
Open-sourcing Grok could help Musk spark interest in his company’s artificial intelligence. Grok is only available to paying subscribers of X, one of the smaller global social platforms, which means it doesn’t have the traction of OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini. Releasing Grok could attract developers to use the model and build on it, and could ultimately help it reach more end users. This can provide xAI with data that can be used to improve its technology.
Musk’s move to free Grok demonstrates his alignment with Meta’s approach to generative artificial intelligence. Meta’s open source models, like Llama 2, have become popular among developers because they can be fully customized and adapted to different uses. But adopting a similar tactic could plunge Musk further into a growing debate over the benefits and risks of making the most powerful artificial intelligence models available to anyone.
Many AI experts believe that open source AI models have significant benefits, such as increased transparency and expanded access. “Open models are safer and more robust, and it’s great to see more options from leading companies in the field,” said Emad Mostaque, founder of Stability AI, a company that builds a variety of open source AI models.