xAI has made Grok’s foundation public on GitHub. This open access allows a wider range of developers to build upon the model, potentially accelerating its development and shaping its future iterations as it rivals tech from OpenAI, Meta, and Google.
This development comes a week after xAI, billionaire and X owner Elon Musk., promised it would happen. On its latest website blog post, the company wrote, “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.”
xAI also notes that, “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.”
Grok’s core code is now available on GitHub under the Apache 2.0 license, allowing for commercial use. However, the training data and real-time connections to xAI are not part of this release.
Musk Opensource Advocacy
Bindu Reddy, CEO for Abacus AI wrote on her X, “We at Abacus AI will start working on it and should have an update/release in a few weeks. The model is too large for the open-source community to iterate on it, but I expect functional quantized versions to be available in the next month.”
She went on to state that Musk has “chosen a side by making Grok Opensource”. Elon Musk has been a vocal advocate for open-source AI. He has criticised Open AI for not doing the same. In fact, Musk has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, an organization he co-founded. The lawsuit claims OpenAI strayed from its initial commitment to open-source development
Since its launch, using the Grok chatbot requires a paid X subscription (identified by a blue checkmark). Grok aims to be a more humorous and current alternative to chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini.
