Elon Musk announced that he will open-source his artificial intelligence (AI) model Grok as a lawsuit against rival ChatGPT developer OpenAI gathers pace.
On March 11, Musk posted on X that this week the model will be open sourced, as it previously was not.
While Musk did not elaborate on his plans to make Grok open source, the responses to his post were mostly positive with users praising him for his decision. One user in particular responded by saying “OpenAI should do the same. If they are ‘open,’ that is,” to which Musk replied that OpenAI is a “lie.”
On Feb. 29, Musk filed a lawsuit against OpenAI claiming a breach of the agreement made when OpenAI was a nonprofit. He argued that OpenAI’s partnership with Microsoft goes against the founding principles of their nonprofit agreement, which was advancing open-source AGI for the benefit of humanity.
As of the end of the year in 2023, it is reported that Microsoft has invested nearly $3 billion into OpenAI.
In the lawsuit, Musk urged OpenAI to return to its initial open-source principles and requested an injunction to stop for-profit exploitation of AGI technology. However, a few days later, OpenAI executives issued a joint statement that revealed that emails sent by Musk pushed for the transformation of the company into a for-profit entity.
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Since the lawsuit was filed, OpenAI reinstated Sam Altman, the company’s CEO, as a member of its board following his firing in November 2023. At the time, they said they didn’t understand how much his departure would “destabilize” the company.
Musk’s decision to make Grok open source falls in line with his requests in his lawsuit against OpenAI to advance open-source AGI for the “benefit of humanity.”
Like OpenAI’s ChatGPT bot, Grok is an AI chatbot which has been developed by Musk’s company, xAI. Unlike ChatGPT, however, Grok is able to access real-time information via the social media platform, and provides answers to more hot-button questions that are rejected by many other AI systems.
To access the chatbot, users must have a verified X account. According to some comparisons, Grok AI, powered by the Grok-1 large language model (LLM), surpasses ChatGPT-3.5 but has a lower performance than the ChatGPT-4 model.
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