Elon Musk, founder of OpenAI competitor xAI, announced last week that xAI would open-source the AI model behind its ChatGPT rival Grok. On Sunday, xAI released the raw base AI model, Grok-1, to the public.
The company specified that Grok-1 was “trained from scratch” on a “large amount of text data, not fine-tuned for any particular task,” like dialogue. Grok first rolled out to U.S. Premium+ subscribers on X in December.
Researcher Igor Babuschkin highlighted the popularity of Grok-1 compared to other open-source AI models on X/Twitter.
The Grok-1 repo is getting pretty popular. I will be responding to pull requests and issues. Feel free to contribute! pic.twitter.com/NHhbyhuEaq
— Igor Babuschkin (@ibab_ml) March 18, 2024
However, not all X users were enthused about the AI model, with one calling xAI’s move to open-source with Grok-1 a “marketing stunt” and writing that “a for-profit company open-sourcing something usually indicates that it’s not good enough to be sold as a product.”
The AI model’s public release occurs on the heels of Musk’s recent lawsuit against OpenAI.
In the lawsuit, Musk asked for a court ruling that would force OpenAI to make its research and technology public. He alleged that OpenAI was working more to maximize profits than to benefit humanity.
The xAI and Grok logos are seen in this illustration photo taken on 05 November 2023 in Warsaw, Poland. Elon Musk’s xAI company this week introduced Grok, its conversational AI which it says can match GPT 3.5 in performance. (Photo by Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
In response, OpenAI executives published a blog post that included emails they received from Musk showing that Musk knew about the for-profit turn of OpenAI.
“Elon wanted majority equity, initial board control, and to be CEO,” the post read. “In the middle of these discussions, he withheld funding. Reid Hoffman bridged the gap to cover salaries and operations.”
Grok-1 joins open-source AI models from other companies, like Mistral AI and Meta.
Related: Meet Grok: Elon Musk Unveils ‘Spicy’ AI Chatbot Riddled With ‘Sarcasm’ and ‘Humor’
