Elon Musk, founder of OpenAI competitor xAI, announced last week that xAI would open source the AI model behind its rival ChatGPT 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 optimized for a particular task,” such as dialogue. Grok first launched to US Premium+ subscribers on X in December.
Researcher Igor Babuschkin highlighted Grok-1’s popularity compared to other open source AI models on X/Twitter.
The Grok-1 repository is becoming quite popular. I will respond 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 enthusiastic about the AI model, with one calling xAI’s move to open source with Grok-1 is a “marketing stunt” and writing that “a for-profit company making something open source usually indicates that it is not good enough to be sold as a product.”
Related: Grimes Reportedly Beats Former Billionaire Elon Musk to Brand ‘Grok’ and His Vision on AI Is Very Different
The public release of the AI model comes in the wake 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 claimed that OpenAI was working more to maximize profits than to benefit humanity.
The xAI and Grok logos are seen in this illustrative photo taken on November 5, 2023 in Warsaw, Poland. Elon Musk’s xAI company this week introduced Grok, its conversational AI that 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 received from Musk that showed Musk was aware of OpenAI’s for-profit pivot.
“Elon wanted a majority stake, initial control of the board of directors and to become CEO,” the post read. “In the midst of these discussions, she withheld funding. Reid Hoffman filled the gap to cover salaries and operations.”
Grok-1 joins open source AI models from other companies, such as Mistral AI and Meta.
Related: Meet Grok: Elon Musk unveils ‘spicy’ AI chatbot full of ‘sarcasm’ and ‘humor’