American billionaire Elon Musk finally delivers on his recent promise of open-sourcing xAI’s Grok language model, sparking an intense debate with OpenAI.
xAI open sources Grok
Last Monday, Elon Musk announced plans to open-source xAI’s Grok chatbot in another strike at the AI firm he helped establish in 2015.
In a significant development, xAI officially declared the open release of the Grok chatbot in its official press release on Sunday.
“We are releasing the base model weights and network architecture of Grok-1, our large language model. Grok-1 is a 314 billion parameter Mixture-of-Experts model trained from scratch by xAI.”
xAI
In an interesting turn of events, ChatGPT replied to Grok’s X post today, saying, “stole my whole joke.” Unsurprisingly, the American billionaire replied to ChatGPT’s mockery.
Technical details and training procedures
Grok-1 features an astounding 314B parameter Mixture-of-Experts model. xAI’s team trained Grok-1 with a bespoke training stack on top of JAX and Rust in October 2023.
Grok-1 taps into extensive data without specific task-oriented adjustments to improve the chatbot’s versatility and adaptability across different applications.
Brief background
Elon Musk’s move to open-source Grok comes amid his ongoing criticisms of ChatGPT-maker OpenAI. The American business tycoon claims that OpenAI abandoned its founding mission to be a non-profit organization with an open-source model.
In contrast, OpenAI benefitted from Microsoft’s investment of $1 billion in 2019 and $10 billion in 2023. It prompted the xAI founder to raise his concerns over OpenAI’s pivot to a closed-source, for-profit model.
In fact, Elon Musk even sued OpenAI and its co-founders, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, for allegedly breaching contracts. However, OpenAI contended in a blog post that the xAI founder had actually approved to pursue a for-profit model as early as 2015.
In retrospect, Elon Musk renounced previous claims about xAI’s intent to boost capital in January. He then launched xAI in July 2023 to compete with OpenAI and AI-related companies. xAI officially launched the Grok language model in November 2023.
Interested people who want to utilize the model can simply follow the instructions here. Unsurprisingly, several AI-powered tool makers are already planning to integrate Grok in their respective solutions. Perplexity Chief Executive Arvind Srinivas even shared on X that the company aims to refine Grok for conversational search and offer it to Pro users.
