Elon Musk's xAI Company Open Sources Grok-1, Because OpenAI Wouldn't

Two can play this game, but in a different way.

Elon Musk helped with the founding of OpenAI, the company that started this whole generative AI trend and commotion, following the release of ChatGPT. At the time, he and many other experts view AGI as both a potential existential threat and a source of profit and power.

They worry that AGI could evade human control and take actions endangering the planet.

But again, humanity is still clueless about this technology, and this is why they are researching for ways to keep humanity in control.

Musk helped OpenAI because its original mission aimed to prevent threats by developing AGI for the benefit of humanity.

But by becoming closed source and for-profit, Musk’s other AI company, xAI, is doing what OpenAI cannot do.

And that is open-sourcing a Large-Language Model that could be one day become a candidate of an AGI.

The billionaire made the announcement in a brief one-sentence post on his X social media.

"This week @xAI will open source Grok," Musk wrote.

By open-sourcing Grok, Musk wants to remain true to his intention.

He said on X that it would release its first AI product "to a select group."

While xAI is independent from X, the Musk-owned social media site formerly known as Twitter, the company’s website said that it will work closely with X and Musk’s Tesla company.

Because of this, Grok boasts a number of unique features, such as access to "real-time" information on X, and views undeterred by "politically correct" norms.

In xAI's own announcement, the base model of Grok-1 was trained on a large amount of text data, and not fine-tuned for any particular task.

It boasts 314 billion parameter, Mixture-of-Experts model with 25% of the weights active on a given token.

The model was trained from scratch by xAI using a custom training stack on top of JAX and Rust in October 2023.

He made this move, simply because he doesn't really like how OpenAI has now become.

The billionaire has filed a lawsuit to accuse CEO Altman, and President Greg Brockman, of breach of contract, breach of fiduciary duty, and unfair business practices.

Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman alleges that the ChatGPT maker’s multi-year, multi-billion dollar partnership with Microsoft betrays its founding commitment to benefiting humanity over profit.

Musk asked OpenAI to be ordered to open its research and technology to the public.

"OpenAI, Inc. has been transformed into a closed-source de facto subsidiary of the largest technology company in the world: Microsoft," the Tesla CEO’s lawsuit said. "Under its new board, it is not just developing but is actually refining an [artificial general intelligence] to maximize profits for Microsoft, rather than for the benefit of humanity."

When Musk helped founded OpenAI back in 2015, he spent his own fortune, worth $1 billion to help fund the company, because its original mission was to become a non-profit, and closed-source.

He argued that OpenAI has become the exact opposite of what it was.

Musk stepped down from the board in 2018 after he failed to take over its management, which came as the result of a disagreement over AI safety.

This was when Musk ventured on, and founded xAI on March 9, 2023.

With the company, he wants to achieve something he cannot achieve with OpenAI: utmost control, and an open-sourcing a powerful Large Language Model.

With ChatPT out of his hands, he is relying on Grok.

Following the accusation, OpenAI isn't staying particularly quiet.

"Elon left OpenAI, saying there needed to be a relevant competitor to Google/DeepMind and that he was going to do it himself," OpenAI said in the blog post.

"He said he’d be supportive of us finding our own path."

Read: OpenAI Becoming Closed Source And For Profit, Is The 'Opposite Of What I Gave The Money For'