Grok AI goes open-source in Elon Musk's latest move in xAI's spat against OpenAI

Despite co-founding OpenAI in 2015, billionaire Elon Musk eventually split from the company in 2018, going on to start xAI, which would later release Grok, a direct competitor to OpenAI's ChatGPT — a large language model (LLM) that hasn't gone without its fair share of criticism. Now, seemingly the latest salvo in Musk's ongoing war against OpenAI, he has announced that Grok is being released publicly as an open-source AI model.

It appears as if the goal of open-sourcing Grok is to both accelerate its development and to introduce checks and balances to the way the company develops its model. Curiously, Musk has said nothing about open-sourcing Grok's training data, which is half of the puzzle that determines an AI's output.

In theory, there is a lot of public good that can come from making Grok open-source. It allows independent developers to both audit and improve the algorithm for everyone's benefit. It can also allow private users and researchers to build on xAI's work to create and train their own LLMs for niche use-cases.

It remains to be seen, however, what licence xAI and Musk will use to publish Grok, and how the company plans to monetise the AI. Usually open-source projects, like popular 3D modelling program, Blender, have some sort of funding to keep them running, and while Elon Musk certainly has substantial financial means available to him, it seems unlikely that he could bankroll the project for a significant amount of time.

xAI is also hardly the first for-profit company to release its AI as an open-source project, with Stable Diffusion's Stability AI and Meta's LLaMA just some notable inclusions.

Over the years, Elon Musk has had more than his fair share to say about OpenAI, which, with the launch of xAI, has become his direct competitor. In a statement issued by OpenAI just last week, the company detailed Musk's agreement that a for-profit entity was necessary to secure the funding that it would need to realise its stated mission — AGI (artificial general intelligence).

The company also explained in the statement that Musk wanted OpenAI to "attach to Tesla as its cash cow," as "Tesla is the only path that could even hope to hold a candle to Google." OpenAI's comments in the blog directly mention that Elon wanted control over OpenAI, one way or another.

Read about Elon Musk's work at Tesla in Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson or get into AI with the Nvidia Jetson Nano Developer Kit from Amazon.