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Elon Musk To Make xAI's Grok Chatbot Open-Source

A new chatbot entering the open-source arena. What are you doing OpenAI?

,   and  Sourav Rudra
2 min read

Surprise, surprise, surprise!, Elon Musk has announced something very interesting related to one of X's (formerly known as Twitter) flagship AI offerings.

With a tweet, Elon has unveiled that xAI will be open-sourcing Grok, their generative AI chatbot based on an in-house LLM called Grok-1 with the added bonus of access to content on X.

Launched back in November 2023, I didn't really hear much about it apart from the facts that you would have to be an X Premium+ subscriber to get access to Grok and that it was not open-source.

But, it now seems that the former is no longer the case thanks to this announcement.

To complement this move, even Baby Grok has joined in, acknowledging that it is also going open source. If you didn't know, Baby Grok is a crypto meme coin launched at the same time around Grok, a cryptocurrency whose value depends on its community.

Does it Matter?

For Elon Musk and many open-source enthusiasts, it certainly does. You see, Elon has been in a legal battle with OpenAI and its co-founders Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, alleging that the company has deviated from its original non-profit, open-source mission.

The story is still constantly developing, with the most recent being a string of emails being shared by OpenAI that said Musk wanted to merge them with Tesla, or he wanted full control over the company.

During all that, many did point out that Elon has not open-sourced xAI's technology. But, I think he took that very seriously, and now we have this announcement to open source Grok.

Whatever the driving force behind his decision may be, I am genuinely interested in how it pans out in the end, as this will surely be a big shot at OpenAI, who refuse to open-source their most popular products.

When to Expect: Sometime this week is the timeline Elon has shared, and if you were to take the past as any indication, then you should see the code go open eventually when the time comes.

💬 Well, did you expect this move to come? Or were you expecting something else?

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