Elon Musk Will Open-Source Grok LLM
Elon Musk’s xAI company will open-source its Grok large language model, the CEO announced on X (formerly Twitter) this week. Grok’s core generative AI model will be freely available to developers and researchers, following in the mold of Meta’s Llama 2 and Mistral AI, which have open-sourced their own large language models.
Open Grok
By open-sourcing Grok, Musk appears to be making good on his professed goal of democratizing advanced AI capabilities. The public release could enable developers and researchers to freely experiment with, modify and build upon xAI’s language model technology. Musk had previously restricted access to Grok to paid subscriberson X. Broadening its availability may help xAI attract more user engagement and data to continue improving the AI system’s performance.
This week, @xAI will open source Grok
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 11, 2024
The Grok-1 LLM is a 63-billion-parameter model with an 8,000 data token context window, which translates to about 6,000 words for its short-term memory. The company claims Grok-1 outcompetes many of its potential rivals. Going open-source also continues Musk’s stated plans for xAI after setting up the company formally last year when he purchased around 10,000 graphics processing units (GPUs) for large language model training.
The decision to make Grok open-source contrasts xAI with OpenAI and others, which keep their models proprietary. That may be a deliberate strategy. Musk recently filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, which he co-founded but later exited. He now alleges that the Microsoft-backed firm abandoned its original mission of making AI safely available to benefit humanity. OpenAI has countered with evidence that Musk previously supported a for-profit model. Musk boasted when launching Grok that it is supposed to be both informative and irreverent, with a personality opposite to ChatGPT. Making Grok open could position xAI as a transparent alternative, though concerns remain about governing access responsibly. Grok’s open release will provide a test case to evaluate xAI’s approach and the system’s current capabilities.
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