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Elon Musk announced that Grok, the artificial intelligence (AI)-based chat robot developed by xAI, is now open source. This has been shared publicly on GitHub and will have a significant impact on researchers and developers building on it, thus how xAI will update Grok for the future. Making it open source could provide a strategic advantage for Grok to compete with giants such as OpenAI, Meta, Google.
Open source release of Grok and its implications
This move covers the basic model weights and network architecture of the artificial intelligence known as the “314 billion parameter Mixture-of-Experts model, Grok-1”. The model, taken from a checkpoint in October, has not been fine-tuned for a specific application such as dialogue. This step, which is a turning point in artificial intelligence research, is published under the Apache 2.0 license and also allows commercial use. However, the data used for training the model or real-time data connections are not included in this sharing.
xAI’s strategy parallels Musk’s decision to open source the code of the platform’s algorithms following its acquisition of Twitter (now known as X). While Musk criticizes companies that do not open source their artificial intelligence models, he is also on the agenda with his legal struggles with OpenAI, of which he is one of the founders.
Publishing open source or limited open source models is seen as a way to get feedback from researchers on how the model can be improved. Yet, although completely open-source AI core models exist, the most used models are often closed source or offer limited open licensing. Some examples, like Meta’s Llama 2, offer their research for free while charging customers with large user bases and not allowing developers to build on it.
Regarding the launch of Grok, it required an With this open source move, it remains a matter of curiosity what kind of position Grok will gain in the field and what path it will follow in the competition.
This step by Elon Musk and xAI once again brings to the fore the importance of open source studies in the world of artificial intelligence. Making Grok available as open source could open up new opportunities for both technology developers and researchers, while also impacting competitive dynamics in the field of artificial intelligence.