To compete with OpenAI’s closed ChatGPT paradigm, Elon Musk has announced that xAI has chosen to make its AI chatbot Grok available as open source. Musk’s statement connects with the increasing pace of xAI’s lawsuit against OpenAI. In a post on the X platform, Musk disclosed on March 11 that Grok will become open source this week.
The majority of people who responded to Musk’s article are supportive of his choice to make Grok open source, even though he did not go into further detail. “OpenAI should do the same,” one user retorted. “OpenAI is a lie,” Musk retorted, “if they are ‘open’ that is.”
Elon Musk’s Lawsuit Against OpenAI’s Alleged Violation of Open-Source Principles
Musk claimed OpenAI on February 29th, alleging that the nonprofit company had broken a deal when its established. Elon Musk argues that OpenAI’s collaboration with Microsoft violates the nonprofit organization’s guiding ideals of advancing open-source artificial general intelligence (AGI) for the good of humanity.
By the end of 2023, Microsoft said to have invested close to $3 billion in OpenAI. In this case, Musk asks for an injunction to prevent the for-profit use of AGI technology and exhorts OpenAI to revert to its original open-source principles. But in a joint statement released a few days after the lawsuit filed, OpenAI executives disclosed emails in which Musk seemed to support the company’s move to become a for-profit business.
After being fired and then hired back in November 2023, OpenAI has reinstalled CEO Sam Altman as a board member since the complaint filed. The board said at the time that they were unaware of how much the company would become unstable in his absence.
In line with his demands in his lawsuit against OpenAI, Elon Musk has decided to make Grok open source to further open-source artificial intelligence for the “benefit of humanity.”
Similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT bot, Musk’s startup xAI created the AI chatbot Grok. In contrast to ChatGPT, Grok can respond to more difficult queries that some other AI systems decline to answer and obtain real-time information through the X social media platform.