A few days after he sued OpenAI for forsaking its initial objective in favor of a for-profit model, Elon Musk announced Monday that his artificial intelligence business, xAI, will open-source its ChatGPT competitor, “Grok,” this week.
The billionaire has spoken out against large tech companies like Google using technology for financial benefit on multiple occasions.
He co-founded OpenAI in 2015 and departed three years later; early this month, he launched the case against Microsoft-backed OpenAI.
As a reaction, OpenAI made emails revealing the Tesla CEO’s support for a public plan to establish a for-profit company and his desire for a merger with the EV manufacturer to turn the merged business into a “cash cow.
“This week, @xAI will open-source Grok,” Musk said on his social networking platform, X. The action ties xAI with companies like Meta and France’s Mistral, both of which have open-source AI models, and may allow the general public unrestricted access to play with the technology’s source code.
Additionally, Google has made Gemma, an AI model, available for other developers to customize to their specifications.
Laptops 1000Since Musk launched the lawsuit against the founder of ChatGPT, tech investors, including OpenAI backer Vinod Khosla and Marc Andreessen, co-founder of venture capital company Andreessen Horowitz, have been arguing about open-sourcing in AI.
Although open-sourcing technology helps expedite innovation, some experts have cautioned that terrorists may exploit open-source AI models to produce chemical weapons or even to create a conscious super-intelligence that is uncontrollable by humans.
Musk stated last year at the AI Safety Summit in Britain that he intended to create a “third-party referee” that would supervise companies working on AI and raise red flags if they felt unsafe.
xAI was introduced by Musk last year to develop a “maximum truth-seeking AI” as a rival to OpenAI and GAE. The business launched Grok for X Premium+ users in December.
In a November podcast, Musk hinted that he liked the idea of open-source artificial intelligence (AI) in an interview with podcaster and computer scientist Lex Fridman.
Laptops 1000“Open AI was intended to be a nonprofit open source project, hence the name, which means “open source,” And for the sake of maximal profit, it is now closed,” Musk stated.
