Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company, xAI, has made its Grok language model, called Grok-1, open-source under the Apache 2.0 license with the goal of democratizing access to advanced AI technologies.
Grok-1 is a Mixture-of-Experts model with 314 billion parameters, trained from scratch by xAI. The open-source version includes the base model weights and network architecture, but not the fine-tuning code or datasets used for training.
The model is available for download via a magnet link to a torrent file, which is about 300GB in size and contains 773 files. This move is part of Musk’s broader criticism of AI companies such as OpenAI, which he co-founded but has since distanced himself from, for straying from open-source principles.
The Grok chatbot, powered by Grok-1, was initially released in November for paid subscribers on X (formerly Twitter) and is designed to answer questions with wit and a rebellious streak. It competes with other AI chatbots such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, offering real-time information and a unique sense of humor. Grok-1 has demonstrated competitive performance on various benchmarks, including a 62.9 percent success rate on the GSM8k benchmark.
Distinctive features of Grok-1 include:
By making Grok-1 open-source, xAI aims to provide broad access to its underlying technology, in contrast to the more limited access provided by other AI models. This release is significant in the context of growing tensions between Musk and OpenAI, as well as his ongoing criticism of AI companies that prioritize profits over security and transparency.