Twitter/X‘s AI chatbot Grok is now open source. In a better timeline, I wouldn’t have to know any of those words.
Last Monday, Twitter/X owner and xAI founder Elon Musk announced that Grok would soon go open source, making its source code freely available for anyone to access and modify. Now the company has acted on that plan, releasing Grok-1’s base model weights and network architecture on GitHub.
“░W░E░I░G░H░T░S░I░N░B░I░O░,” the official Grok Twitter/X account posted, mimicking a format frequently used by spam bots claiming to share pornographic images on the platform.
In a brief blog post announcing the release, Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI stated that the model being released is from when Grok-1 was in its “pre-training phrase” in Oct. 2023. So while this base model has been trained on “a large amount of text data,” it hasn’t been fine-tuned to any specific task. This means you’re probably better off continuing to use Grok on Twitter/X if you just want to play with a Musk-approved chatbot (and are prepared to shell out your hard-earned cash to become an X Premium+ subscriber).
For those more interested in toying with code, Grok’s weights and architecture have been released under an Apache 2.0 licence, meaning anyone is free to modify and redistribute them. In an apparent reference to 1989 sci-fi comedy Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, the code of conduct accompanying Grok’s release reads only: “Be excellent to each other.”
“Grok is a 314-billion parameter Mixture-of-Experts model trained from scratch by xAI,” wrote xAI.
Grok was uploaded to GitHub by an account apparently belonging to AI researcher and xAI employee Igor Babuschkin. All you need to do is head over to the website, hit the green ” Code” button, and select the format you want it in.
Musk has been pushing OpenAI to go open source
This move comes just weeks after Musk sued Grok competitor OpenAI for not being open source. Musk previously sat on the ChatGPT creator’s board of directors, as well as invested several million dollars into the AI research company. Now the billionaire has accused OpenAI of breach of contract, contending that there was a “Founding Agreement” that its artificial general intelligence would be open source, and that the organisation would be run as a non-profit “for the benefit of humanity.”
OpenAI has since refuted Musk’s claim, stating that no such agreement existed. It further published emails demonstrating that Musk knew of and agreed with OpenAI’s plans to become proprietary rather than open source, as well as its intention to become a for-profit organisation.
“As we discussed a for-profit structure in order to further the mission, Elon wanted us to merge with Tesla or he wanted full control,” wrote OpenAI, noting that Musk stated OpenAI had zero chance of success without raising several billion dollars per year.
“Elon left OpenAI, saying there needed to be a relevant competitor to Google/DeepMind and that he was going to do it himself… When he left in late February 2018, he told our team he was supportive of us finding our own path to raising billions of dollars.”
Apparently Musk isn’t quite as supportive as OpenAI expected, if his lawsuit is anything to go by.
