The “weights and architecture” that drive X’s Grok chatbot are freely available for academics and designers to use in other projects. A public release of xAI’s AI chatbot Grok is currently accessible on GitHub, according to Elon Musk’s announcement on March 11. To compete with alternative technologies like OpenAI, Meta, Google, and other companies, scientists and developers can improve upon the model and influence how xAI improves Grok in future versions.
This free release consists of the “fundamental weights of the model and network structure” of the “314 billion variable Mixture-of-Experts model, Grok-1,” according to a company blog post. The model comes from a snapshot from October of last year, and it says it hasn’t been adjusted “for any particular use, for example dialogue.”
According to VentureBeat, it is being made available for commercial usage under the Apache 2.0 license; however, connectivity to X over immediate time data and the training data are not included. The LLM Grok was “developed during just four months,” according to a post by xAI published in November 2023. Its intended applications include coding creation, creative writing, and question-answering.
Following his acquisition of Twitter (now X), Musk openly condemned businesses that refused to make their AI model available publicly and eventually made the code underlying the company’s algorithms available. It involves OpenAI, the organization he assisted in forming and is currently suing because it violated an open-source funding agreement.
Companies have released limited or open-source models to gather opinions from others in the field regarding how to make their models better. The most popular models are either closed-sourced or have a restricted open license, even though numerous completely open-source artificial intelligence foundation models exist, such as Mistral and Falcon. For instance, Meta’s Llama 2 offers its research for free, but its seven hundred million users must pay a subscription every day, and the company restricts others from building upon Llama 2.
The Grok chatbot was only accessible with an X subscription, essentially a paid blue check. Grok presented as a more modern, humorous chatbot than Google’s Gemini or OpenAI’s ChatGPT. However, it lacks any feature that would have made it different from other more effective and intelligent chatbots during the initial experiments.
