Elon Musk-led artificial intelligence (AI) company xAI has announced the official release of the source code for its Grok-1 Large Language Model (LLM). This decision, announced by Musk a few days before the publication, was a significant step towards increasing the transparency and accessibility of AI.
Last Monday, Musk promised to open source his sarcastic and unhinged Grok chatbot, and on Sunday xAI followed through on that promise. “We are pleased to introduce the core weights and architecture of Grok-1, our advanced language model,” xAI said on its official website. Grok-1 is a mixture-of-experts model with an architecture containing 314 billion parameters, developed from scratch by the xAI team.
The published Grok-1 model is an unadapted baseline data set from the pre-training phase that ended in October 2023. This means that the model has not been further adjusted for specific tasks, such as conducting dialogues. xAI provides access to the model under the Apache 2.0 licence, underscoring its commitment to supporting open AI research.
In January of this year, Musk denied rumours that xAI was looking for investment, clarifying that he had not held any negotiations on the matter. Having founded xAI in July last year as a competitor to OpenAI and other companies in this field, Musk already launched the Grok chatbot in November, intending to change the current situation in the AI industry.
The decision to open Grok’s source code followed Musk’s criticism of OpenAI, a startup he once co-founded. He also filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and its co-founders, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, accusing them of backing away from the startup’s original goals, choosing a path to commercialization and being closed, especially after OpenAI attracted a $1 billion investment from Microsoft in 2019. and $10 billion in 2023. In response to these accusations, OpenAI said that Musk supported the transition of OpenAI to commercial rails back in 2015.
The opening of the source code of xAI’s Grok chatbot marks a new stage in the development of the field of AI, emphasizing the importance of openness and accessibility of advanced technologies for all mankind. The move not only boosts research efforts but also raises questions about the future of commercialization and ethics in the AI industry, positioning xAI and Musk as key players in the dialogue about the future of the technology.
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