Musk's xAI Releases Grok, the Largest Open-Source Model Yet

xAI takes a leap towards openness in AI.

On March 17th, local time, xAI, the artificial intelligence startup under Tesla CEO Elon Musk, officially announced the open-sourcing of their large model, Grok-1, under the Apache 2.0 license, making its model weights and architecture publicly available. According to their official website, xAI has open-sourced Grok-1's weights and architecture on the software hosting platform GitHub.

Grok-1, as described on their website, is a hybrid expert model with a staggering 3.14 trillion parameters, making it "the largest open-source language model in the world to date." In comparison, publicly available data indicates that OpenAI's GPT-3.5 has 175 billion parameters, putting Grok-1 significantly ahead in terms of scale.

• The xAI official website announced the open sourcing of Grok-1.
• Musk has really followed through on this one. On March 11th, Musk had previously mentioned on social media that xAI would release the source code for its chatbot Grok, meaning the public can freely use the code behind the company's large model technology. Meta's CEO Zuckerberg also commented on social media expressing support.
• On social media, netizens jokingly dubbed xAI as the real "Openai".
• Musk has always been supportive of open-source technology, where creators provide free usage licenses to users and sometimes even allow users to modify their creations. Tesla has already opened up the source code for its car components, and Musk's social media platform X has disclosed some of its algorithms used for content ranking.
• In fact, Musk and CEO Sam Altman's OpenAI have long-standing grievances in the AI arms race.
• Musk was an early funder and co-founder of OpenAI but left in 2018 due to disagreements with Altman on AI safety. He has since become one of OpenAI's most vocal critics.
• On February 29th, local time, Musk just filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, Altman, and another founder, Greg Brockman, alleging that the company violated its initial commitment to open-source, non-profit AI. In the lawsuit, Musk demanded that OpenAI return to open source.
• OpenAI quickly responded to this. According to media reports, in court documents submitted to the San Francisco court, OpenAI stated that they had never reached a founding agreement with Musk regarding non-profit and non-open-source code. They accused Musk of fabricating the so-called founding agreement as the basis for a lawsuit aimed at "promoting his own business interests".
• On the day xAI officially announced the open sourcing of the large model Grok-1, Musk also challenged ChatGPT on the X platform, saying "tell us where OpenAI is really open." Since its establishment in July last year, xAI, under the helm of Musk, has been dubbed as the "OpenAI rival". It's reported that xAI's mission is to "understand the true essence of the universe".

On November 4th last year, the xAI team released their first AI flagship product, Grok. According to their official website, Grok, as a chatbot, is capable of accessing real-time information online, much like ChatGPT, and browsing and utilizing information on the X (formerly Twitter) platform. The term "Grok" originates from the sci-fi novel "Stranger in a Strange Land," referring to a Martian term describing a profound empathy or intuitive understanding of something, a state of comprehensive comprehension. However, the website also cautions users that unlike other chatbot systems, Grok has the characteristic of responding to controversial questions that other AI systems refuse to answer in a humorous and rebellious manner.

Driving Grok is the Grok-1 engine, a large language model developed by the xAI team using cutting-edge technology over the past four months.

(Original title: "True 'Open' AI? Musk's flagship model Grok announces open source: with the largest number of parameters globally")