Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence startup, xAIhe made his great linguistic model, Grokopen source, which allows entrepreneurs, programmers or companies to use the model for their own purposes, but with an alteration.
What happened: In a blog post on Sunday, xAI announced that Grok’s weights and network architecture are now available for anyone to use for their own applications, including commercial ones.
“We are releasing the base model weights and network architecture of Grok-1, our large language model,” the company said, adding: “Grok-1 is a 314 billion expert mixture model parameters trained from scratch by xAI.”
Grok was open source underneath Apache 2.0 License, allowing commercial use, modifications and distribution. However, it cannot be registered as a trademark and users receive no liability or warranty.
The code for Grok can be downloaded from his Github page or via a torrent link.
See also: Elon Musk once revealed why he ‘stopped’ using TikTok: It’s ‘probing my brain’
With 314 billion parameters, Grok outperforms its open source competitors, such as Meta Platforms Inc HALF Blade 2 AND Mistral 8x7B, according to Venture Beat.
Originally released as a first-party model in November 2023, Grok was only accessible via Musk’s social network Xpreviously Twitter. However, the release does not include the entire corpus of training data or any links to the real-time information available on X.
The blog post stated: “basic model trained on a large amount of text data, not optimized for a particular task.”
It also lacks integration with the real-time data accessible on X, a feature that Musk originally touted as a significant advantage of Grok over other LLMs. To access this feature, users will still need to subscribe to the paid version on X, the report notes.
Because matter: Open sourcing Grok is seen as a strategic move by Musk, who is its co-founder ChatGPT-parent OpenAI in 2015 and subsequently dropped it in 2018. Grok is designed to rival ChatGPT, which Musk has criticized repeatedly since its maker’s partnership with Microsoft Corporation MSFT.
Some experts in the sector, such as for example Deep sea resource management managing partner Douglas Clinton, speculated that open sourcing Grok could be Musk’s strategic response to an ongoing lawsuit with OpenAI. “I think in a way he had to, given the lawsuit with OpenAI, to make a statement.”
Gene Munsteranother Deepwater managing partner, predicted that this move could attract significant funding for xAI and position it as a leading private AI company, directly challenging OpenAI.
“Musk reports that xAI has not raised and is not raising money, but I believe that will change soon because speed and deep pockets are key in the AI race,” he said previously, adding: “When it does, it will raise boatloads of money fast.
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Disclaimer: This content was partially produced with the help of Benzinga Neuro and has been reviewed and published by Benzinga Editors.