Grok, Twitter/X’s artificial intelligence chatbot, is now open source. In a better timeline, I wouldn’t need to know any of these words.
Last Monday, Twitter/X owner and xAI founder Elon Musk announced that Grok would soon be open source, making its source code free for anyone to access and modify. Now the company has taken action on that plan, releasing Grok-1’s basic model weights and network architecture on GitHub.
“░W░E░I░G░H░T░S░I░N░B░I░O░,” Grok official Twitter/X account releasedmimicking a format often used by spam bots claiming to share pornographic images on the platform.
Tweet may have been deleted
In a brief blog post announcing the release, Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI said that the released model was generated in October 2023 when Grok-1 was in the “pre-training phase.” Therefore, although this base model has been “trained” on large amounts of text data, it has not yet been fine-tuned for any specific task. This means that if you just want to play around with a Musk-approved chatbot (and are prepared to spend your hard-earned money to become an X Premium+ subscriber), you’re better off sticking with Grok on Twitter/X.
OpenAI shares Elon Musk’s email saying he wants “total control” of the company
For those more interested in the code, Grok’s weights and architecture are released under the Apache 2.0 license, which means that anyone can freely modify and redistribute them.An obvious reference to the 1989 sci-fi comedy bill and ted’s bizarre adventurethe code of conduct accompanying Grok’s launch simply reads: “Be good to each other.”
xAI writes: “Grok is a 314 billion parameter hybrid expert model trained from scratch by xAI.”
Grok was uploaded to GitHub by an account apparently belonging to AI researcher and xAI employee Igor Babuschkin. All you need to do is visit the website, click the green “Code” button, and select the format you want.
Musk has been pushing OpenAI to become open source
Just a few weeks ago, Musk sued Grok competitor OpenAI for not open source. Musk previously served on the board of directors of the creators of ChatGPT and invested millions of dollars in the artificial intelligence research company. Now, the billionaire is accusing OpenAI of breaching its contract, claiming that its general artificial intelligence will be open source and that the organization will operate as a non-profit organization “for the benefit of mankind.”
OpenAI has since refuted Musk’s claims and said no such agreement exists. It also released emails showing that Musk knew about and agreed with OpenAI’s plans to become proprietary rather than open source, as well as its intention to become a for-profit organization.
“When we discussed a for-profit structure to further our mission, Elon wanted us to merge with Tesla or he wanted full control,” OpenAI wrote. He noted that Musk said that if he didn’t raise millions of dollars each year, At a billion dollars, OpenAI has zero chance of success.
“Elon left OpenAI saying there needed to be a competitor to Google/DeepMind and that he would do it himself… When he left in late February 2018, he told our team that he supported us Find your way to raising billions of dollars.”
If his lawsuit is anything to go by, it’s clear that Musk isn’t as supportive of OpenAI as OpenAI expected.
