Designers and researchers have the opportunity to leverage the “weights and architecture” that propel X’s Grok robot for their own projects.
By Emilia David, an AI-focused writer. Previously, she delved into the intersection of technology, finance, and commerce before joining The Verge.
On March 11, Elon Musk revealed that xAI would be making its AI robot Grok open source, with the latest release now accessible on GitHub. As xAI gears up to compete with similar software from OpenAI, Meta, Google, and others, this move empowers experts and developers to expand upon the model and influence the future evolution of Grok.
The foundational “base model weights and architecture” of the 314 billion-parameter Mixture-of-Experts design, Grok-1, are detailed in a recent organizational blog post. The post mentions that the design dates back to October and has not undergone specific fine-tuning for any particular application, such as speech recognition.
Reported by VentureBeat, this release is available for commercial utilization under the Apache 2.0 license, excluding any direct ties to X for real-time data or the training data it was based on. In a November 2023 publication, xAI stated that the LLM Grok was crafted over the past four months, with a focus on applications in coding assistance, creative writing, and question answering.
Following Musk’s acquisition of Twitter (now X), the algorithmic code behind it was eventually unveiled, accompanied by Musk’s public critique of companies that withhold their AI models from the open-source community. Notably, he called out OpenAI, an organization he co-founded, which is currently facing legal action for allegedly reneging on its commitment to remain a non-profit entity.
To foster innovation, companies have been releasing open-source or partially open-source models to solicit insights from other experts. While some popular models remain closed-source or offer restricted licensing, there is a growing collection of fully open-source foundational AI models like Mistral and Falcon. For instance, Meta’s Llama 2 offers free research access, but users with 700 million daily active users are required to pay and are restricted from building upon the Llama 2 model.
Initially accessible through an X membership (referred to as a paid blue check), the Grok bot aimed to present a more whimsical and contemporary robot alternative compared to OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini. However, Grok’s distinctive charm fell short in distinguishing itself from other more robust and sophisticated chatbots available in the market.
