In a move seen as a counter to OpenAI and a reaffirmation of his commitment to open-source AI, Elon Musk will release the source code for Grok, his chatbot competitor to ChatGPT. “This week, xAI will open source Grok,” Musk said in a post on X.

By open-sourcing Grok, Musk empowers developers with the ability to freely delve into, tinker with, and harness the power of the Grok AI model for their own innovative applications.

Elon Musk’s year-old AI company, xAI, has unleashed Grok, a ChatGPT-like chatbot with a twist. Unlike competitors relying on outdated information, Grok leverages real-time access to xAI’s posts to answer your questions with the latest buzz. Designed to be witty and tackle “spicy” questions avoided by others, Grok injects humor and fresh takes into its responses.

Open-sourcing Grok follows OpenAI’s response to Elon Musk’s lawsuit. Musk alleges the ChatGPT-maker breached its original agreements by becoming a closed-source company focused on maximizing profits for Microsoft, rather than prioritizing beneficial AI for humanity. In response, OpenAI argues that the immense computational power required to build cutting-edge AI necessitated a switch to a for-profit model to cover the high costs. [OpenAI and Elon Musk: Closed AI vs. Open AI]

Elon Musk has consistently advocated for both open AI and open-source software. Following his acquisition of X , he released the source code for the recommendation algorithm. This transparency is a significant step, rarely seen among for-profit companies.

Meta released an open-source version of its large language model (LLM), Llama 2. Google followed suit with their factual language model, Gemma. Today, Elon Musk joins the trend by open-sourcing Grok. Will this pressure Microsoft and OpenAI to adopt a more open-source approach to AI development?