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Elon Musk today announced that xAI is going to open source the Grok chatbot. Notably, Grok is one of the competitors of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the company Musk co-founded and recently filed a lawsuit for steering away from the non-profit mission. This lawsuit referred to OpenAI as a “closed-source de facto subsidiary” of Microsoft, which owns over 49% stake. In return, OpenAI said that Musk wanted to combine the company with Tesla and become its CEO in old emails. Now, let’s hop on to the recent development.
Elon Musk announces xAI will soon be open source
Elon Musk shared this update via a post on X, however, he didn’t delve into many details. According to him, the Grok chatbot could open source this week. At the same time, he fired shots at OpenAI. “OpenAI is a lie,” he replied to a user. Open sourcing the code of Grok means that developers could access and modify the code which could open doors for creativity. Among many who reacted to this post is Nothing CEO Carl Pei who called this move, “Based” and Perplexity boss Aravind Srinivas who reacted with a salute emoji.
Grok is accessible exclusively for those users who have subscribed to Premium+ on X. Musk, once referred to Grok as “based and loves sarcasm.” He reiterated that Grok has “little humor in its responses.”
This isn’t the first time for an Elon Musk-owned enterprise
Musk’s companies have a history of open-sourcing codes for users. Tesla, for example, made its patents public ten years ago, and now many car makers use its electric vehicle charging connector. Another Musk venture, X, released the code for its “For You” algorithmic feed last year, but it didn’t reveal much.
Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal points out Musk might be thinking that by allowing other developers and researchers to explore Grok’s code, more people will use the model. Feedback from the developer community could also make Grok better. This makes sense since Grok hasn’t reached the same heights as its competitors, including Microsoft-backed ChatGPT and Google’s very own Gemini.