xAI vs OpenAI: Musk Open-Sources Grok to Undercut ChatGPT’s Closed Approach

In the latest salvo of his war against former company OpenAI, Elon Musk has made good on a pledge to open-source xAI’s foundational language model called Grok – a direct rebuke of OpenAI’s closed approach with ChatGPT.

Just days after announcing the move on the platform formerly known as Twitter, Musk’s artificial intelligence upstart xAI published the 314 billion parameter base weights and full architecture for Grok-1 under an open Apache 2.0 license.

“This is the raw base model checkpoint from the Grok-1 pre-training phase, which concluded in October 2023,” xAI stated, specifying it had not yet applied any fine-tuning for applications like dialogue.

The open release marks Musk’s most aggressive counterattack yet against OpenAI, the AI research company he co-founded in 2015 before departing amid disagreements over its restructuring as a for-profit, closed model after receiving billions from Microsoft.

Musk has repeatedly blasted that pivot as a betrayal of OpenAI’s founding principles of transparency and open-source access. Last month, he filed suit against OpenAI leadership alleging breach of contract over the shift.

On the platform formerly called Twitter, Musk continued taking pithy jabs after the Grok release. When ChatGPT’s account joked “stole my whole joke” about xAI opening its model weights, Musk fired back: “Tell us more about the ‘open’ part of OpenAI…”

The Grok open-sourcing allows external researchers, companies and enthusiasts to freely audit, analyze and build upon xAI’s model for the first time. It remains to be seen how the move may impact OpenAI’s commercial ChatGPT offerings currently dominating the public AI space.

Musk has routinely positioned xAI as the vanguard for more democratized, open and publicly auditable AI development in contrast with OpenAI and other rivals’ proprietary and commercial approach.

However, he denied reports in January that xAI itself was raising capital to match OpenAI’s investment war chest from Microsoft. For now, open-sourcing Grok appears to be Musk’s preferred counterattack against OpenAI’s closed ecosystem.

Both OpenAI and Microsoft declined to comment on xAI’s move or the escalating battle of words between Musk and his former co-founders at the AI research organization.

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