Elon Musk said his startup xAI will open-source Grok later this week, revealing the inner workings of the chatbot to anyone who wants to dissect the AI or build a competing product. The announcement — which came just before 3 am Monday morning in Texas, where Musk makes his home — is short on details, but it’s another poke in his ongoing battle with OpenAI.
The billionaire sued OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman at the beginning of March, arguing the company betrayed its mission to operate as a nonprofit and make its research available to the public. Musk was one of OpenAI’s earliest investors, but he parted ways with the company years ago, and he’s become an increasingly vocal critic after the spectacular rise of ChatGPT.
OpenAI did not immediately respond to Gizmodo’s request for comment.
“Open-source” is a vague term that can mean anything from releasing every line of code to sharing a few key details, and Musk’s announcement didn’t elaborate on the plan. This time last year, he made an elaborate show over his decision to take X open-source, though the code he published didn’t reveal much beyond a high-level view of a couple of the company’s algorithms. Still, the CEO is a longtime proponent of open-source research. Tesla has a practice of releasing details about some of its patents that most companies would keep secret.
Musk isn’t the first to open-source a chatbot. Both Meta and the recent French upstart Mistral AI have published some of their AI code, though in both cases, those approaches keep key details under the belt.
But the move serves to strengthen Musk’s argument against OpenAI. To a large extent, Altman has abandoned his company’s commitment to working in public. Musk put it bluntly during his late-night tweet story. “OpenAI is a lie,” he wrote.