Elon Musk’s xAI has officially open-sourced Grok

Elon Musk-led artificial intelligence (AI) company xAI has officially open-sourced its Grok language model, after Musk announced plans to do so just under a week ago.

Musk said last Monday that xAI would make Grok open-source, and on Sunday, the company announced the open release of the language model in a post on its website.

“We are releasing the base model weights and network architecture of Grok-1, our large language model,” xAI writes in the post. “Grok-1 is a 314 billion parameter Mixture-of-Experts model trained from scratch by xAI.”

“This is the raw base model checkpoint from the Grok-1 pre-training phase, which concluded in October 2023,” xAI adds. “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.”

Before xAI, Elon Musk had hopes for OpenAI at Tesla

The news comes following Musk’s ongoing criticisms of ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, which he helped to found but later left, for abandoning its original intent to be a non-profit with an open-source model. OpenAI received investments from Microsoft of $1 billion in 2019, and $10 billion in 2023, and Musk has pointed to the closed-source, for-profit model as an issue.

On X, the Grok account replied to Musk’s original announcement of plans to open-source the xAI model with a joke about opening its weights to the public:

░W░E░I░G░H░T░S░I░N░B░I░O░

— Grok (@grok) March 17, 2024

The ChatGPT account replied, saying, “stole my whole joke,” to which Musk responded by saying, “Tell us more about the ‘open’ part of OpenAI …”

Last month, Musk also filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and co-founders Sam Altman and Greg Brockman for breaching contracts by pursuing a for-profit, closed-source mission. OpenAI followed up with a blog post claiming that Musk had agreed to move to a for-profit model as early as 2015.

In January, Musk denied claims that xAI was raising capital, saying that he hasn’t had any conversations regarding plans to do so. Musk launched xAI last July as a competitor to OpenAI and other AI companies, later launching the Grok language model in November.

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