Elon Musk, founder of OpenAI competitor xAI, announced Last week, xAI would open source the AI model behind its rival ChatGPT Grok. Sunday, xAI releasing the raw AI core model, Grok-1, to the public.
The company specified that Grok-1 was “trained from scratch” on a “large amount of text data, not fine-tuned for any particular task,” such as dialogue. Grok was first released to US Premium+ subscribers on X in December.
researcher Igor Babuschkin highlighted the popularity of Grok-1 compared to other open source AI models X/Twitter.
Repo Grok-1 is becoming quite popular. I will respond to requests and attractive 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 out xAI's move to open source with Grok-1 a “marketing stunt” and writing that “a profitable company offering something open source usually shows that it's not good enough to sell as a product.”
The public release of the AI model occurs at the end of Musk's latest lawsuit against OpenAI.
In the lawsuit, Musk sought a court order 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 illustration photo taken on November 05, 2023 in Warsaw, Poland. Elon Musk's xAI company this week unveiled Grok, its conversational artificial intelligence that it says can match GPT 3.5 in performance. (Photo by Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
In response, the leaders of OpenAI published a blog post that included emails they received from Musk that showed Musk knew about OpenAI's profitable turnaround.
“Elon wanted majority equity, initial board control and to be CEO,” the post said. “In the midst of these discussions, he withheld funds. Reid Hoffman stepped in to cover salaries and operations.”
Grok-1 joins open source AI models from other companies, such as Mistral AI AND Meta.
Connected: Meet Grok: Elon Musk Unveils 'Spicy' AI Chatbot Filled with 'Sarcasm' and 'Humour'