Elon Musk’s AI startup xAI will open-source Grok, its chatbot rivaling ChatGPT, this week, he said, days after suing OpenAI and complaining that the Microsoft-backed startup had deviated from its open source roots.
xAI released Grok, featuring “real-time access” to information, last year. The service is available to customers paying for X’s subscription.
Musk helped co-found OpenAI as a counterweight to Google. But OpenAI, which was required to also make its technology “freely available” to the public, has become closed-source and shifted focus to maximizing profits for Microsoft, Musk alleged in the lawsuit filed late last month.
The lawsuit has also ignited a debate among many technologists and investors about the merits of open-source AI. Vinod Khosla, whose firm is among the earliest backers of OpenAI, termed the lawsuit a “massive distraction from the goals of getting to AGI and its benefits.”
Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz, responded to Khosla’s tweet by accusing him of “lobbying to ban open source” research in AI. “Every significant new technology that advances human well-being is greeted by a ginned-up moral panic,” he added. “This is just the latest.”
The promise to imminently open-source Grok means that xAI will join the list of a number of growing firms, including Meta and French startup Mistral, that have published the codes of their chatbots to the public.
Musk has long been a proponent of open source. Both Tesla and SpaceX, two other firms he leads, have open-sourced many of their technologies. X, formerly known as Twitter, also open sourced some of its algorithms last year.
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