Elon Musk Says xAI’s Grok Chatbot Will Go Open Source This Week

Elon Musk announced today that Grok, the AI chatbot launched by his new xAI startup in November will be open-sourced later this week. Grok is currently available via an early access program for X Premium+ subscribers, and the chatbot is designed as a research assistant with a bit more “personality” than ChatGPT and other generative AI chatbots currently on the market

The announcement of Grok going open source comes just a week after Musk sued OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman for breaching the company’s original non-profit mission. “OpenAI is a lie,” Musk also posted today, echoing a previous statement saying that he would drop the lawsuit if OpenAI agreed to change its name to “ClosedAI.”

In recent months, OpenAI took the lead of the generative AI race thanks to ChatGPT, one of the fastest-growing apps ever with over 100 million weekly users obtained in less than a year. However, as Musk’s lawsuit pointed out, OpenAI thrived by launching GPT-4 with a closed model and by giving Microsoft an exclusive license to it.

Since its launch in early access last year, Grok didn’t exactly receive the same level of attention as ChatGPT competitors such as Microsoft Copilot or Google Gemini. The chatbot has often been described has having an inclination to respond with the same provocative sense of humor as Elon Musk, something that may not exactly be a killer feature.

Musk emerged as a big supporter of open-source in recent years. The exec claimed that he wanted to acquire Twitter to open-source its algorithm, something the company now known as X has started to do last year. Anyway, Grok going open source won’t be a first: Meta’s Llama family of generative AI models are also open source, and Mistral AI, a company that recently announced a strategic partnership with Microsoft, has also open sourced some of its models.