El ChatGPT de Elon Musk is now open source: what does this mean?

When Elon Musk announced Grok, the eccentric millionaire said that the artificial intelligence chatbot would be a badass and non-woke version of ChatGPT, from OpenAI. Now this language model becomes open source.

Grok DOWNLOAD

Last Monday, Elon Musk, owner of Twitter and founder of xAI, announced that Grok would soon become open source, making its source code available to anyone who wanted to access it and modify it.

Now, the company has implemented that plan and has published on GitHub the source code of the Grok-1 base model and its network architecture.

The Open Source version of Grok will be the outdated one

In a short blog post on their website announcing the release, Musk’s artificial intelligence company, xAI, stated that the model being released is from when Grok-1 was in its “pre-training phase” in October 2023.

So, although this base model has been trained with “a large amount of text data”, it has not been fine-tuned for any specific task. This means that it is probably better to use Grok for less important tasks, as it is very likely to have many flaws.

For those who are more interested in playing with the code, weights, and architecture of Grok have been published under the Apache 2.0 license, which means that anyone can modify and redistribute them freely.

Grok was uploaded to GitHub by an account apparently belonging to AI researcher and xAI employee Igor Babuschkin. All you have to do is go to the website, click on the green “Code” button, and select the format you want.

Musk has been pushing OpenAI to be open source

This move comes just weeks after Musk sued OpenAI, Grok’s competitor, for not being open source. Musk was a board member of the creator of ChatGPT and invested several million dollars in the AI research company.

Now, the billionaire has accused OpenAI of breach of contract, claiming that there was a “Founding Agreement” according to which their artificial general intelligence would be open source, and that the organization would be managed as a non-profit entity “for the benefit of humanity”.

Grok DOWNLOAD

Since then, OpenAI has refuted Musk’s claim, stating that there was no such agreement. Additionally, they published emails that demonstrated that Musk was aware of and agreed with OpenAI’s plans to become an owner instead of open-source, as well as their intention to become a for-profit organization.