Elon Musk says his AI startup xAI’s Grok Chatbot will go open source

Elon Musk said on Monday that his artificial intelligence startup xAI will open source the code of its ChatGPT challenger “Grok” this week, days after he sued OpenAI for abandoning its original mission in favor of a for-profit model.

The billionaire has warned several times against the use of technology for profit by big tech companies like Google. He sued Microsoft-backed OpenAI, which he co-founded in 2015 but left three years later last week.

“This week @xAI will open source Grok,” Musk said in a post on X, the social media company he owns.

The move could give the public free access to experiment with the code behind the technology and bring xAI on par with firms like Meta and France’s Mistral, both of which have open source AI models.

Google has also released an AI model called Gemma that third-party developers can potentially modify to suit their needs.

Tech investors, including OpenAI backer Vinod Khosla and Marc Andreessen, co-founder of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, have been discussing open source in AI since Musk filed a lawsuit against ChatGPT’s creator.

While open-source technology can help speed innovation, some experts have warned that open-source AI models could be used by terrorists to create chemical weapons or even develop a conscious superintelligence beyond human control.

Musk told Britain’s AI safety summit last year that he wanted to create a “third-party referee” to monitor companies developing artificial intelligence and raise the alarm if they had concerns.

Seeking an alternative to OpenAI and Google, Musk launched xAI last year to create what he said would be “a truth-seeking AI.” In December, the startup launched Grok for X Premium+ subscribers.

In a podcast episode with computer scientist and podcaster Lex Friedman, Musk suggested in November that he favors the open-source concept of artificial intelligence.

“The name, open in open AI, should stand for open source, and it was created as a non-profit open source. And now it’s closed source for maximum profit,” Musk said.

© Thomson Reuters 2024