Elon Musk-owned xAI has open sourced its AI chatbot Grok in a move apparently aimed at democratising AI development and to show the way tech rivals such as OpenAI, Meta, and Google.
The open release is now accessible on GitHub, enabling researchers and developers to expand on the model.
Open sourcing refers to making software or technology freely available for anyone to view, modify, and distribute under an open license.
Musk had on March 11 in a post on X, "This week, @xAI will open source Grok."
The tech billionaire is locked in a lawsuit against OpenAI, which he has accused of reneging on its earlier promise to stay open by becoming a for-profit company.
OpenAI has since revealed an email trail with Musk, alleging that the SpaceX and Tesla owner quit the OpenAI board after the company refused his offer to takeover.
Grok is an AI chatbot developed by xAI, aimed at various tasks such as coding generation, creative writing, and answering questions.
The company wrote in a blog post, "We are releasing the base model weights and network architecture of Grok-1, our large language model.
Grok-1 is a 314 billion parameter Mixture-of-Experts model trained from scratch by xAI."
It added, "This is the raw base model checkpoint from the Grok-1 pre-training phase, which concluded in October 2023. This means that the model is not fine-tuned for any specific application, such as dialogue. We are releasing the weights and the architecture under the Apache 2.0 license."
Initially, accessing the Grok chatbot necessitated an X subscription (a paid blue check).
Grok is aimed at providing a more lively and current chatbot option compared to OpenAI's ChatGPT or Google's Gemini.
Although there are several fully open-source AI foundation models, such as Mistral and Falcon, the most popular models are either closed-source or provide limited open licences.
For instance, Meta's Llama 2 offers its research for free but charges a fee to customers with 700 million daily users and restricts developers from building upon Llama 2.
Following Musk's acquisition of Twitter (now X), the code powering its algorithms was eventually made public.
Musk has openly voiced criticism toward companies that don't make their AI models open-source. This includes OpenAI, which he co-founded but is currently suing, claiming that the company violated its original founding agreement to keep its technology open-source.
Large language models are advanced AI systems capable of understanding and generating human-like text, often trained on vast amounts of data, enabling them to perform various natural language processing tasks.
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