Musk's xAI to Open-Source Its Grok Chatbot

"Elon Musk's artificial-intelligence startup xAI will open-source Grok, its chatbot rival to OpenAI's ChatGPT, the entrepreneur said.

The move will be seen as another salvo in the long-simmering feud between Musk and OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman in the artificial-intelligence arms race.

Earlier this month Musk sued OpenAI, Altman and fellow founder Greg Brockman, claiming the company had gone back on its original commitment to open-sourced, not-for-profit AI.

Musk unveiled Grok in early November last year and said it was designed to tackle tasks, including information retrieval and coding assistance, as part of an effort to create AI tools "that assist humanity in its quest for understanding and knowledge."

The system is available to subscribers of his social-media platform X.

Musk has denounced ChatGPT as being politically correct, among other things. He has said the world needed an alternative AI option to Google and to Microsoft, which is a major investor in OpenAI.

The move toward open source could also have a commercial motivation. While it wasn't clear exactly what parts of Grok xAI would release freely, an open-source version could encourage faster uptake of the model by developers and potential customers who wish to test it out -- working essentially as marketing. Feedback and improvements to the open version of Grok from the developer community could also help accelerate xAI's development of new versions, which it could choose to make open or keep proprietary.

Mistral AI, a small Paris-based startup, for instance, started by releasing open-source versions of its AI models and has committed to continue releasing open versions, while keeping its most-advanced models for paying customers. Meta Platforms has also released its language model as open source.

Musk has a history of embracing open-source technology, where the creator gives users a free license to use and sometimes modify their creations. Tesla has open-sourced elements of its cars, while his social-media platform X published some algorithms it uses to rank content.

Musk declared war on Altman with the lawsuit, accusing his former protege of abandoning OpenAI's original mission in pursuit of profit, which OpenAI denies. Their intensifying feud exposes the shifting balance of power in the race to dominate the artificial-intelligence space.

The two men co-founded OpenAI as a nonprofit research lab in 2015, with tens of millions of dollars of early funding coming from Musk himself. Now, Musk is gone and OpenAI has gone commercial, with billions of dollars of funding from Microsoft. OpenAI is leading the AI boom, while Musk's own artificial-intelligence startup has been left playing catch-up to the organization his money helped get off the ground.

Musk has described Grok as having "a rebellious streak," claiming that it has both a love of sarcasm and the advantage of access to real-time information via X.

Musk has complained about other AI companies scraping data from X. ChatGPT, released in November 2022, has so far led the way in generative AI -- sophisticated systems that produce content from text to images. Microsoft has added the technology across its products, including the MS 365 Suite and search engine Bing." [1]

1. Musk's xAI to Open-Source Its Grok Chatbot. Vipers, Gareth.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 12 Mar 2024: B.1.