Artificial intelligence (AI) company xAI, led by Elon Musk, has announced the official open source code of its large language model (LLM) Grok-1. This decision, announced by Musk a few days before publication, was a significant step towards increasing the transparency and accessibility of AI.
Last Monday, Musk promised to open source his sarcastic and uninhibited AI chatbot Grok, and on Sunday, xAI made good on that promise. “We are excited to introduce the base weights and architecture of Grok-1, our cutting-edge language model,” xAI said on its official website. Grok-1 is a Mixture-of-Experts model with a 314 billion parameter architecture designed from the ground up by the xAI team.
The published Grok-1 model is an untrained baseline dataset from the pre-training phase, which ended in October 2023. This means that the model was not further tuned for specific tasks, such as conducting dialogues. xAI makes the model available under the Apache 2.0 license, highlighting its commitment to supporting open AI research.
On social platform X, the Grok account, reacting to Musk's announcement of open access to the Grok code, made a humorous remark about disclosing its “scales”, which provoked a good-natured dialogue with the ChatGPT account. In response to this back-and-forth, Musk questioned how OpenAI lived up to its “open AI” name, highlighting the issue of transparency in AI.
In January of this year, Musk denied rumors that xAI was looking for investments, clarifying that he had not held any negotiations on this issue. Having founded xAI last July as a competitor to OpenAI and other companies in the space, Musk launched AI chatbot Grok in November, aiming to change the current landscape of the AI industry.
The decision to open source Grok follows Musk's criticism of OpenAI, a startup he once co-founded. He also filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and its co-founders, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, accusing them of deviating from the startup's original goals, choosing the path of commercialization and secrecy, especially after OpenAI attracted investment Microsoft Corporation worth $1 billion in 2019 and $10 billion in 2023. In response to these accusations, OpenAI stated that Musk supported OpenAI's transition to commercialization back in 2015.
The open source code of xAI's Grok AI chatbot marks a new stage in the development of the AI field, emphasizing the importance of openness and accessibility of advanced technologies for all humanity. The move not only bolsters research efforts, but also raises questions about the future of commercialization and ethics in the AI industry, highlighting xAI and Musk as key players in the dialogue about the future of the technology.
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