xAI’s Grok chatbot is now available as open-source on Github

Grok, the AI chatbot made by Elon Musk's AI startup xAI, has been released on Github as an open-source project. The open release is now accessible on GitHub, allowing researchers and developers to freely enhance the Grok model.

The model, originating from a checkpoint last October, has been made available without specific fine-tuning for dialogue or any other application. This initiative is expected to shape the future development of the AI chatbot, as it contends with competing technologies from industry giants like OpenAI, Meta, and Google.

In a recent company blog post, xAI outlined the open release of Grok, stating, "This is the raw base model checkpoint from the Grok-1 pre-training phase, which concluded in October, 2023." Regarding the details of the model, the blog added it is a "314B parameter Mixture-of-Experts model, with 25% of the weights active on a given token." Notably, the open-source release is licensed under Apache 2.0, facilitating commercial utilisation while omitting the training data and connections to X for real-time data.

Grok, a generative artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot created by xAI, utilises a vast language model as its foundation. Originating from an initiative led by Elon Musk, it emerged as a direct competitor to OpenAI's ChatGPT. Marketed as possessing a "sense of humour" and equipped with direct access to X, previously known as Twitter, Grok is known by its users to offer a "unique conversational experience".

Elon Musk's advocacy for open-sourcing AI models has thus far been evident, particularly following his acquisition of Twitter, Musk has openly criticised companies withholding their AI models, including OpenAI, a company he co-founded but is now in the process of suing.