Musk: Grok Will Become Open-Source AI Model

Elon Musk said his artificial intelligence (AI) company xAI will introduce an open-source model.

“This week, xAI will open source Grok,” Musk wrote on X (formerly Twitter) Monday (March 11), referring to the AI chatbot he introduced last year. 

This week, @xAI will open source Grok

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 11, 2024

The announcement comes 11 days after Musk sued OpenAI — a company he helped found — for allegedly deviating from its mission to develop AI that helps humanity, in favor of chasing profits.

Musk was one of the founders of OpenAI at its inception nine years ago, but left the company’s board in 2018. 

“To this day, OpenAI, Inc.’s website continues to profess that its charter is to ensure that AGI ‘benefits all of humanity,’” his lawsuit said. “In reality, however, OpenAI, Inc. has been transformed into a closed-source de facto subsidiary of the largest technology company in the world: Microsoft.”

OpenAI said last week it will ask a judge to dismiss Musk’s suit, writing on its blog that it is still committed to a mission to “ensure AGI [artificial general intelligence] benefits all of humanity.”

In that post, OpenAI said that it realized building AGI will require “far more resources than we’d originally imagined,” and that the company and Musk agreed in 2017 that a for-profit entity would be necessary to obtain those resources.

Some legal experts say Musk might have an uphill battle. In an interview with PYMNTS earlier this month, attorney Seth Kugler of the Cupertino, California-based firm Grellas Shah LLP, said it will be tough to prove OpenAI abandoned its original mission because it licensed GPT-4 and kept elements proprietary.

“In order to prove that this is a breach, Musk must show that GPT-4 is artificial general intelligence,” said Kugler, who focuses on AI and corporate governance. “AGI is an artificial intelligence that can broadly perform any task as well or better than a human. Accordingly, it can teach itself to do new tasks outside of its original training — basically a full substitute for high-level human intelligence.” 

At the same time, the suit could disrupt OpenAI’s dominance in the industry by diverting resources and harming its reputation in the wake of the rapid firing and rehiring of chief executive Sam Altman last year, said Muddu Sudhakar, CEO of the AI firm Aisera.

“There are likely to be concerns from customers as well,” Sudhakar said in an interview with PYMNTS. “They were already worried because of the abrupt and temporary ouster of Altman last year.

Meanwhile, Musk continues to rail against the company on social media. Following Musk’s announcement Monday, a user on X suggested that OpenAI should also make its ChatGPT model open source.

“OpenAI is a lie,” replied Musk.