Tesla CEO, Elon Musk, on Monday announced that his artificial intelligence company, xAI will open-source its chatbot, Grok this week.
This comes as Musk is challenging the decision of another company he co-founded, OpenAI to make its ChatGPT a closed-source tool.
The promise to imminently open-source Grok means that xAI will join the list of a number of growing firms, including Meta and French startup Mistral, that have published the codes of their chatbots to the public.
XAI released Grok last year, arming it with features including access to “real-time” information. The service is available to customers paying for X’s monthly subscription.
Musk and OpenAI
Earlier this month, Musk sued ChatGPT-maker OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman, saying they had abandoned the startup’s original mission to develop artificial intelligence for the benefit of humanity and not for profit.
- Musk helped co-found OpenAI as a counterweight to Google. But OpenAI, which was required to also make its technology “freely available” to the public, has become closed-source and shifted focus to maximizing profits for Microsoft, Musk alleged in the lawsuit filed late last month.
- The lawsuit has also ignited a debate among many technologists and investors about the merits of open-source AI.
The lawsuit, filed in a court in San Francisco late Thursday, says that OpenAI, the world’s most valuable AI startup, has shifted to a for-profit model focused on commercializing its AGI research after partnering with Microsoft, the world’s most valuable company that has invested about $13 billion into the startup.
- “In reality, OpenAI Inc. has been transformed into a closed-source de facto subsidiary of the largest technology company in the world: Microsoft,” Musk stated in the lawsuit.
OpenAI counters Musk
Meanwhile, the other co-founders of OpenAI, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, have countered Musk’s claims.
The founders in a response published on the OpenAI blog said Musk was part of the decision to make OpenAI a for-profit entity in 2017.
According to them, based on the decision, Musk wanted OpenAI to be merged with his company, Tesla so that he could have full control. The billionaire was also said to have requested to have majority equity, initial board control, and to be the CEO of the company.
While noting that they, together with Musk recognized a for-profit entity would be necessary to acquire those resources, they said this led to moves by the billionaire to have full control of the company.
