The company xAI, owned by the billionaire Elon Musk, has released the source code for the AI-powered chatbot Grok and published it on GitHub. This escalates the competition over who will control the future of artificial intelligence technologies.
This allows researchers and developers to focus on the model and contribute to shaping the developments of the chatbot Grok produced by the emerging AI company in the upcoming periods. This happens at a time when Grok is competing with technologies from other big companies like OpenAI, Meta, and Google.
A post by xAI mentioned that the available Grok-1 version as open source includes the initial model standards and the network structure specific to the Mixture-of-Experts model, which contains approximately 314 billion parameters.
The company stated that the model was derived from a developmental stage in October last year, and has not been precisely modified to fit any specific purpose, such as conversation.
xAI announced the release of its open-source version under the Apache 2.0 license, allowing commercial use. However, it does not cover the data used to train the version, nor does it address the mechanism used to link the system to the x platform to benefit from real-time data.
The company announced in November 2023 that they had been working on the enhanced version of the large language model for the Grok robot over the past four months. This development was designed to serve in areas of code creation, creative writing, and responding to inquiries.
After Musk’s company took ownership, x published their AI algorithm code. Musk himself criticized companies that keep their AI technologies secret and do not share them with the public.
This includes OpenAI, a company he co-founded, against which he is currently suing for allegedly breaching the founding agreement that stipulated an open-source platform.
Companies have released open-source or restricted-source versions to gather other researchers’ opinions on how to develop and improve them.
Despite many types of fully open-source AI, the patterns that are commonly used are either privately inaccessible or provide open usage permission but with restricted conditions.
The AI company xAI launched the chatbot “Grok” last year, available to subscribers in the deluxe +Premium package of x service.
The chatbot can access some information related to x, although the openly available version does not include the ability to connect to social networks.
