Tech billionaire and X boss Elon Musk announced on March 11 that xAI would make its AI chatbot Grok open source, and it has now become accessible on GitHub. This move now lets researchers and developers to enhance the model and influence future updates to Grok, as xAI seeks to compete with rival technologies from OpenAI, Meta, Google and other companies.
According to a company blog post, the open release comprises the "base model weights and network architecture" of the "314 billion parameter Mixture-of-Experts model, Grok-1." The post further states that this model originates from a checkpoint in October and has not undergone fine-tuning "for any specific application, such as dialogue."
"We are releasing the base model weights and network architecture of Grok-1, our large language model. Grok-1 is a 314 billion parameter Mixture-of-Experts model trained from scratch by xAI. This is the raw base model checkpoint from the Grok-1 pre-training phase, which concluded in October 2023. This means that the model is not fine-tuned for any specific application, such as dialogue. We are releasing the weights and the architecture under the Apache 2.0 license," the company wrote in a blog post.
Earlier this month, Musk had made public his plans about his artificial intelligence (AI) company, xAI, and had said that he will open-source "Grok" chatbot which has been designed to compete with OpenAI's ChatGPT. Musk stated that Grok will be open-sourced and made available to the public later this month.
During a podcast episode featuring Lex Fridman, Musk expressed his appreciation for the concept of open-source AI, said a report by news agency Reuters. The billionaire's startup had introduced the AI model to a select group of users in November of last year.
"This week, @xAI will open source Grok," Musk said in a post on X, the social media firm.
This comes amid Musk recently stating that his social media venture, X, formerly Twitter, is contemplating eliminating the display of likes and repost counts on posts on the platform. Additionally, Musk mentioned that X is nearing approval for a money transmitter license in New York, with expectations of obtaining it within the next few months, the media has reported.