This week, Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence venture xAI plans to make Grok, a chatbot that competes with ChatGPT, publicly available. The announcement came a few days after the businessman sued OpenAI, claiming that the Microsoft-backed company broke away from its commitment to an open-source foundation.
Grok was introduced by xAI last year, and it came equipped with capabilities like viewpoints unaffected by politically correct norms and actual-time data access. Users can access the program by subscribing to X for a monthly fee of $16.
Musk helped establish OpenAI with Sam Altman almost ten years ago to challenge Google’s leadership in artificial intelligence. He should have specified what features of Grok he intended to make publicly available. However, Musk claimed in the complaint filed late last month that OpenAI, which was obligated likewise to offer its technology freely accessible to everyone, has turned closed-source and changed its goal to increase profits for Microsoft.
The mission statement of OpenAI, according to its website, is still to ensure that AGI serves humankind as a whole. However, according to Musk’s lawsuit, OpenAI has become a de facto restriction to the closed-source division of Microsoft, the biggest tech firm in the world.
The case has sparked a discussion about the benefits of open-sourced artificial intelligence among many investors and technologists. Vinod Khosla, whose company was one of the first to support OpenAI, referred to Musk’s legal action as a major diversion from the objectives of achieving artificial intelligence (AGI) and its advantages.
Co-chairperson of Andreessen Horowitz Marc Andreessen charged Khosla with pushing for legislation against open-source research on artificial intelligence. According to Andreessen, a ginned-up ethical crisis accompanies every big new technology that enhances the well-being of humans, and his company, a16z, has supported Mistral, an open-source chatbot. It is the most recent update.
Grok will soon become open source, enabling xAI to follow in the footsteps of several other expanding companies like Meta and Mistral that have made their chatbots’ source codes available to the public.
Musk has always supported open source. He also leads Tesla, a company whose patents are free source. According to Musk’s 2014 statement, Tesla will not file patent litigation against someone wishing to exploit our technology honestly. Last year, X—previously known as Twitter—also made certain the company’s algorithms available to the public.
On Monday, he repeated his critical assessment of the Altman-led company, declaring that OpenAI is a scam.
