On March 11th, Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, announced on Twitter/X that xAI will make Grok, their artificial intelligence model, open source (Musk). This follows Musk’s lawsuit against xAI competitor OpenAI, in which Musk claimed that OpenAI had “strayed from its original nonprofit mission of researching AI for the benefit of humanity” (Mark).
What are xAI and Grok?
xAI is a company led by Elon Musk that is “working on building artificial intelligence to accelerate human scientific discovery. We are guided by our mission to advance our collective understanding of the universe” (xAI). Grok is the name of xAI’s artificial intelligence model which stands as a rival to OpenAI’s ChatGPT artificial intelligence model. As described by xAI, Grok is their “frontier LLM”. An LLM is a large language model meant to “recognize and generate text, among other tasks” through being “trained on huge sets of data” (Cloudflare Authors).
What Does “Open Source” Mean?
When a software is open source, the underlying code of the software “is designed to be publicly accessible—anyone can see, modify, and distribute the code as they see fit” (RedHat Authors). Essentially, you could download a full copy of an open-source software and modify it or improve upon it as much as desired.
Furthermore, open-source software is “developed in a decentralized and collaborative way, relying on peer review and community production”, and it “is often cheaper, more flexible, and has more longevity than its proprietary peers because it is developed by communities rather than a single author or company” (RedHat Authors).
Thus, by becoming open source, the community will be able to download, modify, and improve upon the code for the Grok AI model. Anyone can then provide feedback and their improvements to the community, which, in turn, may be implemented into the official Grok model.
Resources & Further Reading
Cloudflare Authors. “What Is a Large Language Model (LLM)?” Cloudflare, Cloudflare, Inc, www.cloudflare.com/learning/ai/what-is-large-language-model/.
Mark, Julian, et al. “Elon Musk Sues OpenAI, Accuses ChatGPT Maker of Abandoning Its Original Mission.” Washington Post, 1 Mar. 2024, www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/03/01/musk-openai-lawsuit/.
Musk, Elon. Twitter, 11 Mar. 2024, twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1767108624038449405.
RedHat Authors. “What Is Open Source?” Redhat.com, Red Hat, Inc., 24 Oct. 2019, www.redhat.com/en/topics/open-source/what-is-open-source.
xAI. “About XAI.” X.ai, 2023, x.ai/about/.
The H.A.C.K.E.R. Project 
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