Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company, xAI, has officially open-sourced its Grok language model, Grok-1, under the Apache 2.0 license.
This move follows Musk's announcement of his intention to make Grok open-source, aiming to democratize access to advanced AI technologies. Grok-1 is a 314 billion parameter Mixture-of-Experts model trained from scratch by xAI. The open-source release includes the base model weights and network architecture but does not include the fine-tuning code or the datasets used for training.
The model is available for download via a magnet link for a torrent file, which is approximately 300GB and contains 773 files.
This release is part of Musk's broader critique of AI companies like OpenAI, which he co-founded but later left, for moving away from open-source principles.
The Grok chatbot, powered by Grok-1, was initially released in November to paid subscribers on X (formerly Twitter) and is designed to answer questions with wit and a rebellious streak. It competes with other AI chatbots like OpenAI's ChatGPT by offering real-time information and a unique sense of humour. Grok-1 has demonstrated competitive performance on various benchmarks, including a 62.9% score on the GSM8k benchmark.
By open-sourcing Grok-1, xAI aims to provide broad access to its underlying technology, contrasting with the more restricted access provided by other AI models.
This release is significant in the context of increasing tensions between Musk and OpenAI and Musk's ongoing criticisms of AI companies prioritizing profits over safety and transparency.