United States: Elon Musk, the founder of xAI, has announced that it will open-source the Grok AI chatbot to compete with ChatGPT later this week.
This hints that the AI startup will release the source code of its Grok AI chatbot. This move will enable everyone to access and use a significant portion of the source code in their chatbots.
The move comes shortly after Musk sued OpenAI, accusing the Microsoft-backed startup of straying from its original open-source regulations and now concentrating exclusively on profits. The xAI launched Grok last year, offering real-time information to subscribers of X’s premium service for $16 per month.
Musk was one of the early supporters of OpenAI. A decade ago, the xAI’s owner funded OpenAI, expecting that it would succeed in taking over the monopoly that became Google.
According to Elon Musk, OpenAI moved away from sharing its AI technology. Musk argued that the company became closed-source and is now concentrated on boosting Microsoft’s profits. This case flared up a dispute among technologists and investors about the value of open-source AI. In his criticism of Musk’s legal action, Vinod Khosla described it as a ‘massive distraction’ from the goal of achieving Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and its benefits.
Marc Andreessen, the co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz, blamed Khosla for being against open-source AI research. However, Andreessen asserted that each important technological improvement is met with excessive crises, and that open-source AI is crucial for progress. To endorse the statement, Andreessen indicated that his firm, a16z, backed Mistral, an open-source chatbot.
With this move, the xAI joins companies such as Meta and French startup Mistral which made their chatbot code public. Additionally, Grok will join several other open-source projects initiated by Elon Musk. The xAI owner is a vocal backer of open-source initiatives. At Tesla, many patents are made open-source. Additionally, X also accepted steps to open-source some of its algorithms last year.