xAI, an AI startup that makes up one of Elon Musk’s many projects, will open-source Grok. These are all real words now.
It’s not entirely surprising that Musk would open-source Grok — a chatbot similar to ChatGPT that is modeled after the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, according to xAI. This move comes just a few days after Musk sued OpenAI for no longer being an open-source non-profit organization.
“This week, @xAI will open source Grok,” Musk posted on X, on Monday morning.
Grok is only available to people who pay for the $16 monthly subscription for X.
By making Grok open source, the public will have free access to play around with the code that holds it all together. As Reuters pointed out, open-sourcing technology like Grok has the opportunity to help speed up innovations in the space because you have significantly more people who can access it. But that same accessibility can be used by bad actors, too.
Musk didn’t elaborate on what aspects of Grok will be open source, what that will look like, or what that might lead to. But he did respond to someone on X in response to his post about open sourcing Grok to say “OpenAI is a lie,” so it’s pretty clear that this has something to do with the beef between OpenAI and Musk. Musk co-founded OpenAI with Sam Altman and a lot has changed since then — much of which Musk does not seem particularly pleased with.
What even is Grok, anyway?
“To this day, OpenAI’s website continues to profess that its charter is to ensure that AGI ‘benefits all of humanity.’ In reality, however, OpenAI has been transformed into a closed-source de facto subsidiary of the largest technology company in the world: Microsoft,” Musk’s lawsuit read, according to TechCrunch.
Musk, for his part, has been mostly consistent in his support of open source — many of Tesla’s patents are open source.
