Why Elon Musk Had to Open Source Grok, His Answer to ChatGPT
After suing OpenAI this month, alleging the company has become too closed, Elon Musk says he will release his “truth-seeking” answer to ChatGPT, the chatbot Grok, for anyone to download and use.
“This week, @xAI will open source Grok,” Musk wrote on his social media platform X today. That suggests his AI company, xAI, will release the full code of Grok and allow anyone to use or alter it. By contrast, OpenAI makes a version of ChatGPT and the language model behind it available to use for free but keeps its code private.
Musk had previously said little about the business model for Grok or xAI, and the chatbot was made available only to Premium subscribers to X. Having accused his OpenAI cofounders of reneging on a promise to give away the company’s artificial intelligence earlier this month, Musk may have felt he had to open source his own chatbot to show that he is committed to that vision. OpenAI responded to Musk’s lawsuit last week by releasing email messages between Musk and others in which he appeared to back the idea of making the company’s technology more closed as it became more powerful. Musk ultimately plowed more than $40 million into OpenAI before parting ways with the project in 2018.
