Elon Musk to make Grok chatbot open-source, taking swipe at OpenAI

Elon Musk announced Monday that his artificial intelligence startup xAI will make its chatbot, Grok, open-source this week while taking another swing at OpenAI amid his legal battle with the ChatGPT creator.

The tech billionaire and Tesla CEO made the announcement on his social media platform, X, and after a follower replied that OpenAI should do the same, Musk wrote, “OpenAI is a lie.”

Musk’s move to make Grok open-source comes less than two weeks after he sued OpenAI — which he co-founded in 2015 and left in 2018 — claiming the company abandoned its original founding mission to develop open-source artificial general intelligence technology for the benefit of humanity over profits.

The lawsuit, which also names OpenAI CEO and co-founder Sam Altman, claims Altman and fellow co-founder Greg Brockman originally approached Musk to make an open-source, non-profit company and that the company’s shift to making money breached that contract. 

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Musk claims breach of fiduciary duty and unfair business practices against OpenAI and asks for the company, now backed by Microsoft, to revert to open source.

Altman, Brockman and OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever pushed back against the lawsuit in a blog post on the company’s website last week, writing that they “intend to move to dismiss all of Musk’s claims.

In their post, OpenAI’s leaders revealed communications showing Musk backed the organization’s move to create a for-profit entity and suggested it should merge with Tesla.

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Musk’s move to make Gronk open-source could give the public free access to experiment with the code behind the technology and aligns xAI with firms such as Meta and France’s Mistral, both of which have open-source AI models.

Google has also released an AI model called Gemma that outside developers can potentially fashion according to their needs.

Tech investors including OpenAI backer Vinod Khosla and Marc Andreessen, co-founder of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, have been debating about open-sourcing in AI since Musk filed the lawsuit against the ChatGPT maker.

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While open-sourcing technology can help speed up innovations, some experts have warned that open-source AI models could be used by terrorists to create chemical weapons or even develop a conscious super-intelligence beyond human control.

Musk said at Britain’s AI Safety Summit last year that he wanted to establish a “third-party referee” that could oversee firms developing AI and sound the alarm if they have concerns.

Seeking an alternative to OpenAI and Google, Musk launched xAI last year to create what he said would be a “maximum truth-seeking AI”. In December, the startup rolled out Grok for Premium+ subscribers of X.

In a podcast episode with computer scientist and podcaster Lex Fridman, Musk suggested in November that he favored the concept of open-source AI.

“The name, the open in open AI, is supposed to mean open source, and it was created as a nonprofit open source. And now it is a closed source for maximum profit,” Musk said.

FOX Business’ Michael Dorgan, Eric Revell and Reuters contributed to this report.