Not open source, but Musk's xAI makes Grok-1 AI available for developers

xAI has not made Grok fully open-source model, but has made it available for developers and researchers to build upon

Elon Musk owned xAI startup has made its Grok-1 AI model available for researchers and developers on GitHub. Earlier, Musk through a post on X (formerly Twitter) announced that his artificial intelligence startup xAI would open-source its ChatGPT alternative Grok. 

In a press note released by xAI on March 17, the company announced that it is releasing  “the base model weights and network architecture of Grok-1,” which is “a 314 billion parameter Mixture-of-Experts model.” The company added the weights and the architecture is being released under the Apache 2.0 licence, which permits distribution of licensed works, modifications under different terms than the original work without the source code. 

xAI said that the model available is “a raw base model checkpoint from the Grok-1 pre-training phase, which concluded in October 2023”. This essentially means that the model is not fine-tuned for a specific application. 

The company has not entirely open-sourced grok but has opted for a more open-weight approach. Open-weight, unlike open-source, is not completely transparent but provides developers a pre-made mould on which they can build upon. Open-source models require comparatively more work on the developers front but enables more understanding and customisation options. There are many fully open-source models available such as Mistral and Falcon. However, according to a report by The Verge, the most widely used models are either closed-sourced or offer a limited open licence, such as Meta’s Llama 2.

Recently, Musk filed a lawsuit against Microsoft-backed OpenAI, stating that the company abandoned its original mission of creating open-source technology in favour of a for-profit model. Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015 but left three years later.